The Year In Lists: 2011's Best Animation/Motion Graphics

As another year comes to a close, it’s time to look back with a wistful gaze and reminisce about all that 2011 had to offer. It’s fair to say it’s been bountiful, with a smorgasbord of delights coming at us from galleries, computer screens, installations, and catwalks encompassing all sorts of styles across a whole range of disciplines. To honor our faves we’ll be rolling out a list a day for the rest of the week.

Today we’re kicking it off with Best Animations/Motion Graphics, followed by Best Music Videos (Tues), Most Futuristic Fashions (Wed), Best Interactive Installations (Thurs), and Best Kinect Hacks (Fri).

In addition to our curated picks, we want to hear your suggestions too, which you can do via the comments section below, or hit us up on Facebook, Twitter or email: editor@thecreatorsproject.com. We’ll take your recommendations into account and each category will call out a special “People’s Choice” winner based on the most-recommended work.

For Best Animation/Motion Graphics we were spoilt for choice. You only needed to have kept a casual eye on Vimeo and YouTube to know that there is no shortage of stellar work in this realm being created by amateurs and professionals alike. From abstract animation to CG-sci-fi, animations involving solar winds, augmented realities, and beautifully rendered worlds, there was plenty to choose from.

Here are our faves below:

Robots of Brixton by Kibwe Tavares (PEOPLE’S CHOICE)

Kibwe Tavares, from Factory Fifteen, used Brixton in South London as the location to set his dystopian sci-fi tale about a robot underclass fed up of being repressed and ignored, rising up to confront the authorities. Using various film and editing styles, he based it on the Brixton riots of 1981 adapting images taken at the time by social photographer Dan Hoffman and using real locations in Brixton as the framework to hang his robot slums and cheap high rises of the future on. Although it was based on the riots of the past, it became weirdly prophetic after the clashes in Brixton seen in August of this year.

Amalgamation by Michael Jang

Taking 20 portraits taken by photographer Michael Jang, French motion graphics artist Micaël Reynaud morphed them together using After Effects. Their faces become a cascading wave of features, scrambling together glasses, lips, noses, eyes from different sets, as the various faces—young and old—wobble never quite into focus—leaving you staring in blinking amazement.

20 Hz by Semiconductor

This comes cracking into life as static sounds and black and white imagery become sculptural landscapes and cosmic whistlings, and solar winds become creepy, fizzing visuals. Data from a geomagnetic storm which took place in the Earth's upper atmosphere is interpreted as audio.

Semiconductor

then used this audio, which was all captured at a frequency of 20 Hz, to generate the unsettling but fascinating visuals.

Loner by Sticky Monster Lab

The monster of the story is a hikikomori, a recluse who hides from the world and is also an avid collector of “stuff” that clutters up his home leaving him unfulfilled and empty. He’s befriended by a curious, under-developed monster called Ke and the two of them eventually form a friendship. The animation is beautifully done, the pace and emotion perfectly pitched, and with no dialogue the video is open to interpretation by the viewer in this tragicomic tale.

Violet Dark Spring of the Numinous Orb by Yoshi Sodeoka

If you felt like this list was missing a psychedelic element then look no further then this, part of Yoshi Sodeoka’s Sibyl project inspired by the pompous excesses of prog rock. Taking flight on the astral planes that were once the threshold of commercial rock this vid uses refracting, nesting orbs to immerse you in its shimmering, chromatic awakening.