Excellent collection of CG short films! Recommended!
Paul Steffen | Monterey, Ca | 01/22/2000
(5 out of 5 stars)
"It's frustrating paying $20 for a DVD only to get a bunch of lame Bryce or amateurish Lightwave animations and maybe two or three good ones, if at all. My last few CG DVD purchases were like that, and I probably would have avoided this one had not a friend called me up and told me about it! (Thanks! HH!) The quality of many of the animations on this disc are _REALLY_ good, with only a few exceptions. A couple of my personal favorites on this disc;"Michael Gagne's Prelude to Eden" is _AWESOME_! Gagne is a well-known animator (his childrens books are on Amazon) and worked on Iron Giant. If you liked the climax in Iron Giant, you'll like this one. "Light & Heavy" - another of Pixar's Luxo Jr. shorts done for Sesame Street."Joe & Basket: Mostly Sports" - Very wacky and well-done character animation. "Dreamaker" - Very surreal animation with a nice music track. This is one of the best I've seen yet in this style. "Operating Manual for Spaceship Uterus" - Too surreal for words! Awesome!"Displaced Dice" - This is neat little animation from Mental Images (makes of the excellent MentalRay rendering software, used by Softimage and now 3D Max 3) showing off some very cool displacement mapping effects on a very simple scene. Nice music track."Beyond the Walls" - This is a very cool "virtual band" animation produced by Animusic. This animation was actually produced in stereoscopic form to be shown at amusement parks as "Concerto in 3D!" One nice aspect with this animation is the fact that quite a bit of the animation was driven directly by the MIDI soundtrack. Animusic also did the intro animation for this DVD."Dutch Nelson, Galaxy Guy" - A rather long comical animation done in the typically, ummmm, aesthetic-minimalistic style of Ronin Animation. What it lacks in subtlety makes up in humor, I guess..."Tinkle Terror" - Very funny and cute animation. One of the best 'student' animations I've seen."