This is a very short animation I found on YouTube, I believe it's a student animation from some competition. Anyway, I picked it because it does a very good job of telling a story. I won't spoil it for you, but the ending is great, and very unexpected. In just over a minute this animation conveys a sense of tension, whimsy, anxiety, and a plethora of other emotions. I think story really is the most important part of any animation, game, video, website, or whatever you're making. Conveying a feeling or a theme is, in theory, why you're creating whatever it is you're working on. I think the creator/creators of this video did a really good job of conveying a mood, theme, and feeling in this piece. I also think they did a really nice job of leaving some questions in this story. You don't know what this monster is, you don't know why it's chasing this guy or why they're on this train, and I think that's deliberate. There's enough holes in this story for people to make assumptions and fill in the blanks, and that's pretty cool too.

It Just Feels Good At First

Train came out with their new music video for their song "Feels Good At First".  This music video features a very cool effect where you watch the video in a silhouette of Pat's head.  As well as this, the music video plays a lot with transparency to help create the idea of reminiscing on memories.

If I had to guess how they created the effect of playing the music video in the silhouette of Pat's head, I would say that they masked his head and took out Pat's face.  They then inserted the music video into where Pat's head was.  But if you look closely, there is the rest of the image in Pat's head on the outside of the silhouette, just with a higher opacity.  This could be done through using Mocha to track and then mask Pat's head.  It's a simple technique with a creative and powerful image.

Transforming Train Whaddup

So this an animation done by some dude named Dan Tremont, an animator who is skilled as any I've ever stumbled across online. This is a simple, 12 second animation that showcases the animators talent for texturing, modeling and animating a very interesting sequence. This probably took a long time to render, but I'd say it probably landed him a few jobs. Maybe he can make the next Transformers movie better than the last two God-awful pieces of "cinema." But I digress, here's the vid:

 Tell me that isn't awesome.

It's simple, yet totally effective. It's a stylized animation, not super realistic where this could be in a Transformers/Battleship movie, but simple enough to get the point across. That's what the best short VFX clips do: they showcase the author's talent.

But here's a friendly reminder that sometimes the best visual effects are no visual effects at all (miniatures and practicals)  :)