Daniel Greaves

Animator Daniel Greaves produced the short film ‘Manipulation’ in 1991 and won numerous awards including an Oscar. The animation shows a cartoonist draw a little man on the page and he then comes to life and mingles with a patch of spilt ink to give him colour, and then interacts with the cartoonist who tries to squash, pull, stretch and screw up the little figure. There is no sound to the piece other than a few light sound effects, and the figure is only made up of a few faint pencil lines but it is truly the inventive and comical way the cartoon moves about the page and interacts with the human hand that brings the character to life. It also involves lots of 3d stop motion as well as just 2d on the page for example he jumps up out of the page into a paper mache character, then falls off the desk and becomes 2d when he hits the floor. This gives it new life half way through and keeps the action flowing all the way to six and a half minutes long. The short must have been very well storyboarded and taken a very long time to produce but the end product is a masterpiece, in my design work I will have to try and storyboard my work before I carry it out so that I know exactly how long to make each section and know exactly what I want to happen at each stage of my piece.

eat PES

I found this wonderfully twisted website called Eat Pes whilst researching into animation and styles of animation, the company is founded by a woman called Sarah Phelps and from what i can see is based in America. Pes has done lots of shorts and commercials for a number of high profile companies such as; Orange, PSP, Bacardi, Nike and most recently More than.
All these adverts use stop motion animation and are very well executed but the videos that caught my eye the most were 'Kaboom' and 'Western Spaghetti' which uses unusual household objects to create long distance shots such as gift wrap bows as explosions and popcorn as cannonballs etc. This unusual technique works really well and makes them a little bit surreal and very enjoyable to watch, I think the creators must have been highly influenced by Jan Schvankmayer as the stop motion technique is very similar to the technique he mastered.