20 Beautiful Video Motion Pieces
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.
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.
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.
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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Eddy Munn
March 7th, 2009 5:15 amFantastic Inspiration, not seen many of these before.
DKumar M.
March 7th, 2009 5:19 amNice Collection… Not exited though… still it’s OK!!
Miracleworld
March 7th, 2009 6:00 amvery nice collection :)
joyoge designers' bookmark
March 7th, 2009 6:02 amnice and funny thanks..
Samir
March 7th, 2009 6:44 amGood Inspiration, many thanks
Marc
March 7th, 2009 7:39 amVery nice, thanks!
Joffrey
March 7th, 2009 8:08 amNice to you see here Fub’z. :)
Great post!
Geek and Hype
EDi
March 7th, 2009 9:12 amVery nice.
Loki
March 7th, 2009 9:13 amcool videos , 20 is enough
Teo Bitca
March 7th, 2009 9:20 amSimply amazing!
Temecula
March 7th, 2009 9:44 amPeripetics by ZEITGUISED is very odd. Odd in a good way I guess, like Salvador Dali.
Sabine
March 7th, 2009 10:53 amI am in love with Carlos Loscano’s “A short love story in stop motion.” Thanks so much for including it. =)
Torley
March 7th, 2009 11:15 amOh awesome! Gotta save this to my Tumblr for dinnertime viewing. :D
faster
March 7th, 2009 11:37 amWonderful content !
macias
March 7th, 2009 12:24 pmamazing videos…
Mike
March 7th, 2009 12:25 pmQuite a collection, thanks for sharing. Really enjoyed watching several of these.
Leigh Taylor
March 7th, 2009 1:40 pmGreat collection
That was about 30min to and hour (i lost track really lol) of great inspiring work!
Damdam
March 7th, 2009 2:12 pmMais tu es partout mon Fubiz :-)
Matei (Romania)
March 7th, 2009 2:40 pmYou 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:
MakeDesign,NotWar
March 7th, 2009 3:20 pmExcellent 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
DVNT
March 7th, 2009 4:24 pmFucking fantastic stuff. Had seen a few before, but again you guys deliver the goods!
:)
Erik M Kubitschek
March 7th, 2009 7:58 pmI 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
Toju
March 7th, 2009 9:00 pmnice, love it
Debashish Paul
March 7th, 2009 10:48 pmgreat list! I love it…
Keri
March 8th, 2009 1:56 amNice list, two additional ones i really like are by Ross Ching
http://rossching.com/eclectic
http://rossching.com/eclectic-20
Christian
March 8th, 2009 2:05 amGreat 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?
Dennis
March 8th, 2009 2:27 amThank you very much! It is a amazing good inspiration!
Gogsy7
March 8th, 2009 2:42 amWonderful collection!
Dane
March 8th, 2009 9:35 amI 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.
tetsuo
March 8th, 2009 3:31 pmwhat is the video image of the subject?
Rory Martin
March 9th, 2009 3:14 amThese 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?
BongoBox
March 9th, 2009 6:02 amThere 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
Greg
March 9th, 2009 6:21 amHey Dane…. it seems to work for everyone else. Make sure it’s not you before letting he accusations fly.
AND… NO Mr. Bill?????
Dane
March 9th, 2009 8:49 amTechnical 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!
Disposable_Hero
March 9th, 2009 8:54 amHmm…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
Heyki
March 11th, 2009 11:01 pm太棒了！
momo
March 16th, 2009 5:32 amVraiment 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.
Stephen
March 16th, 2009 6:47 amGreat roundup of motion graphics work. I’ve seen some of these at Motionspire.com, which is an excellent resource as well.
Moth
March 19th, 2009 5:57 amthere’s a great selection to be had over at this channel on Vimeo >>>
http://vimeo.com/channels/designflux
Fierljepper
March 20th, 2009 5:59 amFor everybody like me who went nuts trying to find out what the piece is featured in the intro, the sculpture is called Sitooterie.
curtis
May 8th, 2009 10:11 pmThe Love Story and 1001Faces animation are amazing!!!!