20 Beautiful Video Motion Pieces

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A show reel is the motion picture equivalent of an artist’s portfolio. It is typically used as a tool to promote an artist’s skill, talent and experience in a selected field, such as acting, directing, cinematography, editing, special effects, animation, video games or another graphic-related field. It is conventional in the film industry to have one, and it is the main tool by which an artist promotes her or his own work.

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In this episode of our inspiration series, we present 20 examples of beautiful motions pieces: stop-motion, experiments, show reels, demos, paintings and more.

Motion Pieces

London (harder, better, faster, stronger)
Stop-motion: more than 3000 pictures, all put together in less than 2 minutes.

Obama ’08 – Vote For Hope
“Vote For Hope” was written to encourage and inspire the hip-hop generation, and everyone else, to get involved and contribute their time, energy and creativity.

World War – 3D Animation
World War was created by Vincent Chai for his final degree project while studying 3-D Animation at the University Of Hertfordshire.

Love Story
A short love story in stop-motion.

Fireplays
A fireworks show for the 4th of July. Music by MGMT.

Scintillation
An experimental film made up of over 35,000 photographs. It is an innovative mix of stop-motion and live projection mapping techniques.

Minilogue – Animals
Animation and character design by Kristofer Ström.

Khoda
More than 6,000 paintings were painstakingly produced over 2 years to create this 5-minute film that meets the creator’s high standards.

History of the Internet
An animated documentary explaining inventions ranging from time sharing to file sharing, from ARPANET to Internet.

Origami In the Pursuit of Perfection
Commissioned by the advertising agency Nordpol+Hamburg to tell the story of the Japanese sports brand ASICS.

Mykonos
Stop-motion music video for Fleet Foxes.

Revamped Graphic Equalizer
Independent stop-frame animation project.

L’homme 100 têtes
Dynamic portrayal of “1001 faces” is a mosaic of portraits and emotions that plays off of the power of faces seen close up.

Interstellar Sugar – Suryummy
San Francisco-based VJ. Dark area and VJing.

Galactic Mail
Galactic Mail is a project made with Jonathan Vuillemin. It was produced by The Mill in 2008.

Smith and Nephew
A spot by PSYOP. Directed by Eben Mears and Mate Steinforth.

GKaster
New GKaster demo reel.

MTV ‘Organic’ Idents
MTV commissioned Umeric to direct 12 channel Idents and print materials for the rebranding of MTV Australia.

Mark Coleran – Screen Show Reel
Show reel of screen design work for Mark Coleran’s various films over the last 9 years.

Peripetics by ZEITGUISED
Zeitguised made a piece in six acts for the opening exhibition at the Zirkel Gallery. It entails six imaginations of disoriented systems that take a catastrophic turn.

Motion & Audio Experiments
Small show reel showcasing a few experiments with motion effects and a dark, distorted synchronized soundtrack.

Last Click

Redesign in Motion
Don’t miss this HD motion piece: a presentation by Mattrunks about the new version of Fubiz.net. Music by College (Moulinex Remix).

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Since 2005, Romain Colin has been the founder and publication director of Fubiz, a daily dose of inspiration and creative resources. He is also on Twitter.

  1. 1

    Eddy Munn

    March 7th, 2009 5:15 am

    Fantastic Inspiration, not seen many of these before.

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  2. 2

    DKumar M.

    March 7th, 2009 5:19 am

    Nice Collection… Not exited though… still it’s OK!!

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  3. 3

    Miracleworld

    March 7th, 2009 6:00 am

    very nice collection :)

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  4. 4

    joyoge designers' bookmark

    March 7th, 2009 6:02 am

    nice and funny thanks..

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  5. 5

    Samir

    March 7th, 2009 6:44 am

    Good Inspiration, many thanks

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  6. 6

    Marc

    March 7th, 2009 7:39 am

    Very nice, thanks!

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  7. 7

    Joffrey

    March 7th, 2009 8:08 am

    Nice to you see here Fub’z. :)
    Great post!

    Geek and Hype

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  8. 8

    EDi

    March 7th, 2009 9:12 am

    Very nice.

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  9. 9

    Loki

    March 7th, 2009 9:13 am

    cool videos , 20 is enough

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  10. 10

    Teo Bitca

    March 7th, 2009 9:20 am

    Simply amazing!

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  11. 11

    Temecula

    March 7th, 2009 9:44 am

    Peripetics by ZEITGUISED is very odd. Odd in a good way I guess, like Salvador Dali.

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  12. 12

    Sabine

    March 7th, 2009 10:53 am

    I am in love with Carlos Loscano’s “A short love story in stop motion.” Thanks so much for including it. =)

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  13. 13

    Torley

    March 7th, 2009 11:15 am

    Oh awesome! Gotta save this to my Tumblr for dinnertime viewing. :D

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  14. 14

    faster

    March 7th, 2009 11:37 am

    Wonderful content !

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  15. 15

    macias

    March 7th, 2009 12:24 pm

    amazing videos…

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  16. 16

    Mike

    March 7th, 2009 12:25 pm

    Quite a collection, thanks for sharing. Really enjoyed watching several of these.

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  17. 17

    Leigh Taylor

    March 7th, 2009 1:40 pm

    Great collection

    That was about 30min to and hour (i lost track really lol) of great inspiring work!

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  18. 18

    Damdam

    March 7th, 2009 2:12 pm

    Mais tu es partout mon Fubiz :-)

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  19. 19

    Matei (Romania)

    March 7th, 2009 2:40 pm

    You missed one out:
    http://vimeo.com/2388735?pg=embed&sec=2388735&hd=1

    This is one of the most innovative and impressive that i have ever seen:

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  20. 20

    MakeDesign,NotWar

    March 7th, 2009 3:20 pm

    Excellent collection, makes me want to crack open AE and start learning it… Not a bad way to start a design session :)
    Make Design, Not War

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  21. 21

    DVNT

    March 7th, 2009 4:24 pm

    Fucking fantastic stuff. Had seen a few before, but again you guys deliver the goods!

    :)

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  22. 22

    Erik M Kubitschek

    March 7th, 2009 7:58 pm

    I love these stop motion pieces, don’t forget the Adel video for Chasing Pavements. Another cool one is over at graphpaperpress.com. It is located in their modularity theme example on the home page

    http://graphpaperpress.com/demo/

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qz7vGW2_5c0

    I just love this website,
    Erik Kubitschek

    http://www.pxltechnologies.com

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  23. 23

    Toju

    March 7th, 2009 9:00 pm

    nice, love it

    0
  24. 24

    Debashish Paul

    March 7th, 2009 10:48 pm

    great list! I love it…

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  25. 25

    Keri

    March 8th, 2009 1:56 am

    Nice list, two additional ones i really like are by Ross Ching

    http://rossching.com/eclectic

    http://rossching.com/eclectic-20

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  26. 26

    Christian

    March 8th, 2009 2:05 am

    Great Collection! Thanks for sharing these videos. I am curious what program was used (could be used) to create an illustrated animation like History of the Internet. Any ideas?

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  27. 27

    Dennis

    March 8th, 2009 2:27 am

    Thank you very much! It is a amazing good inspiration!

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  28. 28

    Gogsy7

    March 8th, 2009 2:42 am

    Wonderful collection!

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  29. 29

    Dane

    March 8th, 2009 9:35 am

    I am using Mozilla 5.0/Firefox 1.5.50.6 with a T1 Internet connection and can’t view these videos. They load and play for 3 seconds, then nothing. I can move the control to various timeline points but it will only play for a second or two. No audio either!
    Doesn’t this illustrate exactly what designers should NOT do? That is, designing content that cannot be handled by “mainstream” browsers.

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  30. 30

    tetsuo

    March 8th, 2009 3:31 pm

    what is the video image of the subject?

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  31. 31

    Rory Martin

    March 9th, 2009 3:14 am

    These are simply remarkable, I’m so impressed by these videos.
    Origami In the Pursuit of Perfection is a vision to behold and Khoda is pure genius. The Obama video has a really cool retro style, love it! Thank you so muck for bringing this collection to my attention, they’ve given me so much inspiration.
    Where do you find this stuff?

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  32. 32

    BongoBox

    March 9th, 2009 6:02 am

    There are some nice pieces here, but also some self-indulgent gratuity IMHO, like London & Fireplays.

    Find/create/use a cool effect, repeat it with slight variations 1000 times, add groovy/hip/coo

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  33. 33

    Greg

    March 9th, 2009 6:21 am

    Hey Dane…. it seems to work for everyone else. Make sure it’s not you before letting he accusations fly.

    AND… NO Mr. Bill?????

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  34. 34

    Dane

    March 9th, 2009 8:49 am

    Technical followup-
    I have upgraded to Firefox 3.0.7, checked to ensure Flash 9 is my plug-in, and the videos still hang after 3 seconds, even when they appear to be downloaded (example–London harder, better, etc.). Haven’t had problem playing videos at other sites (e.g. Boing Boing, YouTube, HULU, etc.).

    Hey Greg–what are you basing the “seems to work for everyone else” on? My point is, if people can’t view these, they probably just move on and don’t bother posting. I am trying to help others that have a similar problem.

    Whatever software gremlins are at work here, I don’t have time to troubleshoot further.

    Smashing Magazine is an incredibly useful site,
    but this page isn’t quite right!

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  35. 35

    Disposable_Hero

    March 9th, 2009 8:54 am

    Hmm…I liked what I saw at first, but later on down the page I started getting “Sorry, video is temporarily unavailable” errors on everything I haven’t watched yet…too bad

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  36. 36

    Heyki

    March 11th, 2009 11:01 pm

    太棒了!

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  37. 37

    momo

    March 16th, 2009 5:32 am

    Vraiment cool ce post. Il y a beaucoup de publication intéressantes sur smashingmagazine.
    Je crois que je vais être un peu plus régulier sur ce site.
    (Dane, you were still using Firefox 1.5 !)
    Maybe there is a problem with your computer, I’ve been able to read the videos in Firefox 3 and google chrome.

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  38. 38

    Stephen

    March 16th, 2009 6:47 am

    Great roundup of motion graphics work. I’ve seen some of these at Motionspire.com, which is an excellent resource as well.

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  39. 39

    Moth

    March 19th, 2009 5:57 am

    there’s a great selection to be had over at this channel on Vimeo >>>
    http://vimeo.com/channels/designflux

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  40. 40

    Fierljepper

    March 20th, 2009 5:59 am

    For everybody like me who went nuts trying to find out what the piece is featured in the intro, the sculpture is called Sitooterie.

    0
  41. 41

    curtis

    May 8th, 2009 10:11 pm

    The Love Story and 1001Faces animation are amazing!!!!

    0
  42. 42

    Fiwlvlhv

    June 22nd, 2009 6:47 am

    vlkR7H comment2 ,

    0

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