Honda Stop Motion Ad

This is a fantastic stop-motion ad that caught my eye. Stop-motion animation artist PES created this Honda ad, which features thousands of hand-drawn illustrations of the brand's cars and motorcycles. To produce this ad, designers had to hold pieces of paper up to the camera and constantly change the camera of the angle to create the motion. PES even received a 2013 Academy Award nomination for Best Short Film (Animated) for "Fresh Guacamole," which showed avocado dip being made with green clay and dice.

I really love this ad because of how creative and well put together it is. I like how the ad goes through many Honda models and has a different location/story for each. The sound effects also really add to the ad, it ties the whole thing together. I think more companies should make ads like this because it is unique and really catches the viewer's eye and attention.

My Love for Stopmotion

Back when I first got into filmmaking around the age of nine, I had my heart set on working for Pixar, I just adored their animation (and the fact they rode scooters around the office). As my interest slowly moved to live action with CGI, animation has still always held a special place in my heart. I enjoyed making the occasional stop-motion, and experimenting with 3D animation. This has lead to a great appreciation of the art of stop-motion, knowing how painstaking the process can be.

Being a long time YouTube/Vimeo user, I've gathered a quite a collection of "favourites" over the years. Someone who I'm a big fan of, and I'm sure many people are familiar with, is PES. This video, Western Spaghetti, has to be one of my all time favourite animations.

I think one of the things which really sells it, is the sound. It's a simple, yet matches perfectly with what's being seen, and gives the video that little extra "oomph".

Sound is something which I feel is often overlooked with animations. The visuals are such an important part, so much attention is paid to it, that good sound is often missing. But when it is there, it makes for all the more better video.

Playing with the Eyes and Ears

It is basic human nature to associate certain sounds to certain actions or objects. For instance when you hear a loud bang with a sharp metallic ting to it, you can assume it was some metal object hitting concrete or some other hard surface. However through animation, we have the ability to broaden the possibilities of said actions and objects. PES's film "Fresh Guacamole" is what I like to call an audio-visual palette cleanser, because it makes you rethink how to apply sounds to actions.

Simply by re-associating cooking sounds to random objects, you get an interesting short that is much more appealing to the viewer, rather than animating actual avocados and chips.

Playing with the eyes and ears can also lead to better story telling. In the short "Out of Sight", a blind girl must find her seeing eye dog solely through touch and sound. Due to her young age many of the objects like cars, planes, or people, are reimagined into fish-cars, or whale-planes.

One of my favorite parts of this animation is when we encounter the cat. Initially it is just a blob, it rolls around until it meows, which then unravels into a cat. It's interesting to see the world building process because you become immersed in the video.  

PES

My favorite animation of all time was created a few years ago by a stop-motion artist who goes by the name of "PES". It was called "Fresh Guacamole". The short animation looks at the process of making fresh guacamole in a totally unique way, using common household objects in place of the ingredients. It was widely popular and racked up more than 11-million YouTube views. If you haven't seen it already, take a look for yourself before reading any further. This is one of the only videos I've seen that I can say anyone in the world would enjoy watching:

"Fresh Guacamole" won the Academy Award for best short film in 2013. The video was actually somewhat of a sequel to an earlier short film along the same line called "Western Spaghetti" which you can watch here:

If you are craving more videos like this, you are in luck, because two months ago PES released a third video called "Submarine Sandwich":

What I love about this video is that PES released a "Making Of" video to show you how he shot the entire thing, frame-by-frame:

PES

So I found this really awesome animation by PES:

Western Spaghetti

The animation in this YouTube video is amazing because no one really thinks of the everyday items that were used could come to life. The fact that the animator made household objects that had nothing to do with cooking into cheese, spaghetti, sauce, etc. was genius. My favorite parts were the candy corn flames and when the person uses real knife skills to cut the Rubix cube into little pieces and individual pieces of the cube come apart to be added to the mix . This is definitely a very creative and well thought out way to do animation.