If you crossed Hunger Games with Oblivion, mixed in some feelings of Moon, sprinkled a little of action from that Bourne movie without Matt Damon and shook it all up with astronaut suits, futuristic guns, another planet and an eerie death match you would get Project Skyborn, a heart pumping short by Marko Slavnic. It’s amazing.
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Sit back, grab a hot cup of tea, maybe open up a bag of cookies and enjoy yourself with this lovely musical animation called Love in the Time of Advertising. It’s a short made by David Bokser & Matt Berenty and it’s adorable in all the right ways, punching through with humor, emotion, double meanings and visual style to fill your imagination.
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When Video Girl Barbie came out in 2010 it seemed like a pretty weird idea to jam a camera into a doll’s décolletage. And at 1.2 MP and 240p, the specs didn’t exactly make it worthwhile. But flash forward to 2013 . . . and it still seems super weird.
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Here’s a fantastic short for you sci-fi fans: Record/Play, directed by Jesse Atlas, is a short film that covers time travel, love, changing fate, war, memories and cassette tapes. It’s slow building yet tense, you’re itching to see what new wrinkles each play of the tape will bring.
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You could say that every Vine is a six-second short film but Airbnb stitched together a hundred Vines to tell one story. Yes, there are some jump cuts and stop motion involved. Yes, there is an inspirational soundtrack. And yes, it’s actually pretty good.
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Crowdsourcing is all the rage these days, so why not apply the concept to shooting a video? That’s exactly what Lexus did when it got together over 200 fans to each shoot frames for a promotional video. What makes the clip unique is that all of the images were captured and posted via Instagram.
The short film, called #LexusInstafilm captured a walk-around of the new 2014 Lexus IS, by instructing each of its Instagrammers to stand (or lie down) in a specific location to capture their still image. 3D mapping technology was used to identify the precise locations where each image needed to be snapped in order to stitch together the final stop-motion video.
Each individual captured their image, applied Instagram filters and posted them with a specific hashtag so they could be filtered and edited into the video sequence later the same day.
Here’s the final video, along with a little behind-the-scenes footage from the shoot:
Sure, it seems like a whole lot of labor to capture just a few seconds of video, but it’s still a creative way to let so many people could contribute to a single video.
2013’s Top 4 Robot Short Films
Japan’s yearly Golden Week, a 10-day stretch of spring garnished with national holidays, tends to shut down almost every industry save tourism & travel. Of course this includes J-robotics movers and shakers, so in this week’s feature we’re going straight-up international fiction and presenting 2013’s best robot-related short flicks to date.
This narrow window of but 4 months gives us a nice, fresh selection, but there’s definitely a huge pile of noteworthy pre-2013 robo-centric shorts out there. It’s difficult for any lone robotics geek to keep a handle on them all, so if you’ve got a favorite you’d like to introduce please let us and other readers know in the comments below.
We’ll get back to Japanese robot sci- next week, but today it’s all -fi. So, go ahead and downshift your thinking cap and enjoy these fine British, German, Malaysian, and Honk Kongian offerings:
The Film: ABE (8m:22sec – Live Action/CGI Hybrid)
Writer/Director: Rob McLellan; England
Chosen Because: Looks great; Explores pitfalls of narcissistic amoral robot self-awareness.
What’s Going on Here: Death by robot. Semi-Inverted Love Allegory vis-a-vis Homicide.
Quote from the Robot: “Maybe this time, I will get it right. Maybe this time, I will fix you.”
ABE is not exactly light viewing. Be warned that it’s morbid and disturbing… but, it will be so mostly in your own head. Which is part of the hook. The blood & guts are only implied, and aside from a few obscured b-roll shots here and an occasional stain there, the viewer’s imagination is what renders the robot-perpetrated gore.
The Film: R’ha (6m:26sec – CGI/Animation)
Writer/Director: Kaleb Lechowski; Germany
Chosen Because: Behold the power of one motivated animator with some sexy software. Plus, AI robots and aliens.
What’s Going on Here: AI/Robot Military Runs Amok on what Appears to be the Evolutionary Eventuality of Sharks.
Quote from the Robot: “Insanity is a neurologic dysfunction. I don’t suffer such weaknesses.”
R’ha gets straight to business with a biological captive, a robotic interrogator, and some backstory on the apocalyptic shenanigans of warbots gone all kinds of murderously self-deterministic on their creators. The content is clearly formulaic, but R’ha is likely more of open-letter resume than exercise in storycraft. That one 22 year-old student wrote, directed, and animated the whole thing just might show proof of concept.
The Film: Changing Batteries (5m:33sec – CGI/Animation)
Creators: Shu Gi, Casandra Ng, Hon JiaHui and Bahareh Darvish; Malaysia
Chosen Because: Lightly explores a possible/likely scenario. Very effective non-verbal communication. Robot.
What’s Going on Here: Isolation; Bonding with Machines; Mortality and Immortality.
Quote from the Robot: N/A – All non-verbal communication here, but expressed well.
After exploring robo-insanity and robo-revolution, the melancholy Changing Batteries actually lightens the mood a bit. While predictable and rather saccharine, it kinda does explore tolerance, acceptance, and bonding with the “other,” in this case embodied by grandma’s little robot helper. Slightly cheese coated, but still a touching, well worth the watch, and well-made final project by a team of 3D animation students – and probably the most relevant to reality of the lot (aging societies will need robots!).
The Film: Modin (2m:50sec – CGI/Animation)
Creators: Lam Ho Tak & Ng Kai Chung Tommy; Hong Kong
Chosen Because: Very good animation, very good music. Slo-mo robots.
What’s Going on Here: Scathing commentary on resource depletion. Or, just two robots fighting over a found battery.
Quote from the Robot: N/A – But lots of mechanical grunting.
Wrapping the top four, Modin is a brief, playful showdown between two equally matched and equally drained robots who perchance across a battery in the barren wasteland they roam. Can they just share, or will it be M.A.D.?
Thanks for Watching!
Remember, if you’d like to get us or other readers hip to an older robot short or one from 2013 that we might have missed, let us know down below.
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Reno J. Tibke is the founder and operator of Anthrobotic.com and a contributor at the non-profit Robohub.org.
Vimeo Movie Links: ABE – R’Ha – Changing Batteries – Modin
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