In a time when light installations are a dime-a-dozen, French animator and director Marc-Antoine Locatelli has managed to separate and distinguish himself from the pack. Floating to the top of Vimeo's Staff Picks has been Nuance (seen above), a short black and white film with a gorgeous trip-hop soundtrack by EdiT. In French, nuance can mean the same as in English, but also pertaining to subtle uses of shade and hues.Surrounded almost entirely by darkness, dancer Lucas Boirat breakdances in battle with streams and pixels of light. The white squares of illumination pop and emerge in his hands and beneath his feet, sometimes appearing like a yoyo, sometimes like a cube flitting around the space. It's a mesmerizing visual narrative made rich by movements timed to the sound. In the end, we're left with the dancer taming the "luminous beast" and stepping back, victorious, into the darkness.Below we've also culled some our other favorite shorts by Marc-Antoine Locatellito show his full range:Graphisme SonoreExp. graphisme sonore flauntsLocatelli's animation talents, as dancing cubes roll around in 3D space as if controlled by knobs and switches from an unseen author. The video features similar themes of smoke, light, and darkness timed to electronic music that we see manifested so successfully in Nuance.PauseHis recent Pause, produced in 2012, starts with a young woman in full color who then closes her eyes and, we presume, enters a pitch dark soundscape of sirens and mechanical clicks and whirls.AnimationsAnimations features character sketches coming to life and dancing through a mix of real-life and animated scenes. They read like a two dimensional Boirat, fighting against gravity and the limits of their body.Marc-Antoine Locatelli
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