...And Speaking of Flaming in Comments Sections...

I while back (up until last month) I was involved in a commercial for MTN. Officially, I'm not yet allowed to reveal what and how much we (Wicked Pixels) are responsible for. That will be revealed at the end of this month.

Bizcommunity.com features an article (which, I must say, does skew one or two facts a bit). Anyway, its spawned quite the flame war in the comments section, and it appears that Wicked has been taking the most flak.

The reason is that the commercial is inspired by a YouTube video of similar concept. But then, the entire new MTN campaign is based around YouTube, and doesn't try to hide it.

I've been able to distance myself from the whole thing, and forced myself not to get involved. But I do feel like I need to clear up a bit of confusion.

Wicked Pixels is an animation house. We animate commercials. We don't conceptualize commercials. That would be the agency's job. The agency responsible is Metro Rep (if you've read the article you'd know this).
I therefore fail to see why Wicked is being flamed for the concept. And yes, you could say the concept was 'stolen', and you might be right. But if you're gonna shovel around blame, at least aim it at the guilty party.

But hey, exposure is exposure, either way.

Anima8.com

Among the sea of clips of 'kids crashing their skateboards' that is YouTube, you occasionally find a short animated clip. Now these animations have a real home, away from the Paris Hilton clips (and, hopefully, the juvenile flaming in the comments sections)

There isn't very much to see right now, only 95 public clips while I'm writing this, but it's certainly a site to keep an eye on.

Limbo

A while back I posted a test image from an animated short (about the animation industry) that I was working on at the time. That project has been on hold for more than 18 months now, and will most probably not be resurrected in the near future (if ever). But when I stopped working on it, I promised myself that one day I'd finish a short using that silhouette style.

My inspiration has been a combination of Tim Burton's animated films, especially Vincent and The Nightmare Before Christmas, Filmax Animation's Nocturna and a few others.

And just lately, Limbo.

It's an indie platformer game, developed in Flash, and it looks amazing. Especially the outdoor bits.

The foregrounds are just flat black silhouettes, but the grayscale backgrounds stretches far into the distance and gives the environments an epic scale, which you normally would lose the moment you work with an orthographic viewport and a silhouetted foreground (think of those Chinese shadow-plays). This nicely circumvents that claustrophobic feeling, and gives an essentially 2D piece a 3D quality.

The site doesn't give a whole lot of information about the game, but it does feature some concept art and a video teaser. Go check it out.