Musician and composer Ben Lovett is no stranger to writing for film -- his award-winning work has been featured in 'The Signal' and 'The Last Goodbye' starring Faye Dunaway, to name a few -- but for 'Eye of the Storm,' it was Lovett who hired a filmmaker to bring his work to life. Director Christopher Alender used state-of-the-art special effects on a shoestring budget for the video, and the result is an eye-popping work that resembles a steampunk take on Frank Miller's 'Sin City' set to Lovett's haunting, acoustic-based song.

"Chris approached me with this idea for the film as an extension of the metaphor," Lovett tells Spinner. "The lyrics in the song deal with a difficult relationship through the portrait of a ship sailing through the heart of a storm."

The video, as described by the director, tells "the story of a lonely captain who has to unshackle himself from a troublesome past in order to move on to the next chapter in his life." To create the lush imagery, Alender exaplains, the process was a painstaking exercise in trial-and-error. "Simulating clouds and water vapor from scratch is extremely labor and computer-intensive and we just didn't have time or money," he says. "To make the different weather conditions, we ended up taking more of a collage approach, poring over thousands of photo sand videos of clouds to get every little piece exactly how we wanted it to look."

"The film is an interesting mirror to the song," Lovett explains. "The recording of 'Eye of the Storm' is all organic instrumentation with a single synthesized element, whereas what you see in the movie is nearly the perfect reversal of that."

Only very rarely do music videos make an appearance on this site, so this must have a very special something. The way they play with the environment is nothing but supreme genius. It’s the Official video for ‘We Got More’, taken from the album ‘Eskmo’ on Ninja Tune. The video was directed by the one and only Cyriak Harris. 

The Arctic Circle is a short stop-motion animated film by Kevin Parry. It tells the tale of a solitary man who encounters a mysterious box — one that seems to offer him great wealth. Filmmaker Tim Burton described to it as “a cross between 2001 and Rudolph: The Red-Nosed Reindeer.

Pahnl: 'Nowhere Near Here' is a stop motion animation that uses a combination of light with stencils and long exposure photography to tell the story of a dog running around the city at night, doing whatever a dog does. The animation was first exhibited at the The Herbert, in Coventry, on the 7th October 2010.


With well over 300 hours in the making, more than 200 stencils involved and too many cold nights spent outside on my knees getting the shots, I am very happy (and relieved) to finally share this with you. Through the course of shooting 'Nowhere Near Here', I have dealt with curious drunks, a dog almost peeing on the camera (the irony is not lost on me, haha), the endlessly suspicious police and even someone nearly running off with a tripod.

Gobelins is an art school in France that I would personally say has the best animation program in the world. Consistently it turns out talented folks year after year and this animated short is equally impressive. It’s called Le Royaume (The King and the Beaver) and was cretaed in collaboration between Nuno Alves Rodrigues, Oussama Bouachéria, Julien Chheng, Sébastien Hary, Aymeric Kevin, Ulysse Malassagne & Franck Monier with music by Mathieu Alvado.

It’s really reminiscent of Japanese animation with lots of interesting character expressions and a real fluidity in the characters move. I also like that the story is a bit dark and mysterious and nature. Where di the King come from? Where did his kingdom go?

Elephants Dream is a computer-generated movie made using open source applications that premiered on March 24, 2006. Beginning production in September, 2005, it was developed under the name Orange by a team of seven artists and animators from around the world. It was originally known as Machina, before being changed to Elephants Dream to more closely match the storyline.

On October first, the open-source movie project of the Blender Foundation released third animated short on YouTube: Sintel. Five days later, the movie had already reached one million views. Previously released only at the Netherlands film festival (on September 27), Sintel’s success is as much due to its quality than it’s open-source nature. Sintel, which means glowing coal, is a fully open-source movie created by the Blender foundation with the use of the open-source application of the same name. Following Elephants Dream and Big Buck Bunny, the short movie is the third such project created by the Blender Foundation, and the fourth project overall. Apart from shorts, the foundation also released a game, Yo Frankie! based on their Bick Buck Bunny movie.  I was impressed by the quality of the film. The images and the story represent an astounding leap from their previous films. Already, a team is working on a video-game adaptation of the same name that will be based on the movie’s storyline and built using the same program, Blender. As I see it, Sintel is a demonstration of the power of opensource, and what community-funded projects can achieve as proof that we don't need a multi-million-dollar commercial projects in order to create an epic movie!

Now this is a real gem of a short-film! ‘Playing with Light – Mon Ami Le Robot’ is one of those cute little animated treats that gets you attracted to it’s cute art-style and entranced by it’s wonderful music.

The film also has a great message of the beauty of friendship, so I have to give it up to the folk at Cube Creative: Louis Thomas, Theo Guignar, and Benjamin Moreau. They made a fantastic film! And of course a job well done to Adrien Casalis also, his audio/sound work really got me immersed into the film.

Linkin Park have just made public a music video for their new single "Waiting for the End". The band's members are featured in individual shots in a dark room with interlocking grids framing their whole body.

"Waiting for the End" appears in Linkin Park's latest No. 1 album "A Thousand Suns" which arrived in stores last month. Music video for the track is directed by DJ Joe Hahn, the band's member who has worked on many of Linkin Park's clips including "The Catalyst".

"The clip is an experiment in making the most digital version of ourselves in the spirit of the visual pallette of A Thousand Suns," Hahn said of "Waiting for the End" video. "If you have been following our visuals throughout this album, this is the next step in our journey. I wanted to push ourselves so far down the digital path that it eventually felt spiritual. As we live our lives in the digital noise of today, we can find our center of humanity in the midst of the chaos."