Is this Pixar’s next movie? Nope, this is the 2006 demo reel of a fellow Art Institute classmate of mine. Billy Woodward and I graduated at the same time in September of 2006. During our graduation screening, Billy’s demo reel blew everyone away. And even if you ignored his 3d animation or his storytelling abilities, the fact that he got the “Voice Over King”, Don LaFontaine, to do a custom voice over for his demo reel shows just how far he would go to make his vision as compelling as possible. Watching this short trailer made you feel like you were actually in a theater waiting for the feature presentation to start. It was easily the best showing of the night leaving everyone wanting more.

I was going to write up this post at some point in the future but when I heard Don died yesterday from complications of a collapsed lung at age 68, I immediately thought of Billy’s demo reel. The fact that he would take the time out of his busy voice-over schedule to help a graduating art student spruce up his demo reel shows just what a great guy Don was. He will be truly missed and movie trailers just won’t be the same without that booming, authoritative voice we’ve grown familiar with.

I have no idea if these portable cardboard toilets are serious products or some sick joke but I got a kick out of the page design. Featured in Smashing Magazine’s Texture and Patterns Design Showcase, TheBrownCorporation.com lured me in with their simple, to-the-point layout and Little Jack, the quirky mascot.

At any rate, working at The Brown Corporation must be the shit!

Lazy Sunday Afternoon by Brandon Bird features Christopher Walken building a humanoid robot in his garage, presumably on a Sunday afternoon.

I really like the quirkiness of Brandon’s paintings. Most of them feature celebrities in odd situations like The Anguish featuring Michael Landon in a stream holding a squid. Or one of my other favorites, No One Wants To Play SEGA with Harrison Ford, showing the popular action movie star holding a Sega Genesis looking on at two kids playing Nintendo, ignoring him.

Prints of the paintings are available in different sizes and in some cases the original is even for sale. Check out the rest of Brandon’s funny paintings.

by Rob-Sheridan. A wallpaper version is also available. His painting titled Cereal Mascot Reunion is also worth a look.

Mauricio Guimaraes is a web designer and illustrator from Brazil. His online portfolio at mauricio.art.br demonstrates this in a unique way by creating an immersible environment that shows off his world.

It is not a very complex site, only having 4 sections in total, but it more than makes up for depth with rich visuals. The drawings are detailed, animations smooth, and overall is just down right fun to explore and poke around. Flash is the perfect medium for a site of this nature as the non-linear layout is hard to translate in HTML. Plus, Mauricio avoided many of the things that depress the user experience of a Flash site like music blaring, lengthy load times, and an non-interactive intro screen.

So if you are ever thinking about doing a pure Flash website, take a good hard look at your requirements and make sure the medium supports the desired user experience.

This seems like something Nintendo should have come up with but Petri Purho of Klooni Games from Finland came up with an interesting game. You solve puzzles by drawing shapes on a screen. The goal is to get the ball to touch the star but the twist is the shapes you draw are affected by physics like gravity and collisions. Draw a fully enclosed shape and it will drop and bump into other shapes on the screen. The video below gives you a better idea of how it works.

Klooni Games is an experimental game play project where every month Petri comes up with some kind of experimental game. This is a great project to build fresh life in to the gaming world which has a habit of copycatting succesful titles instead of innovating.

Hopefully we will see more exciting things Petri comes up with in March, which just happens to be tomorrow.

Stumbled upon Andy Council’s portfolio today where I saw this…

The title is Scrapzilla, appropriately enough. He has other similar pieces like Rail Rooster and Junk Robot.

Andy has lots of other intricate illustrations in his complete portfolio. It blows my mind how someone can think up something like this.

(via DesignFlavr)

With every New Year comes new resolutions. Jonas Buntenbruch is a designer with a pretty hefty goal for 2008. Jonas will complete and post a new design everyday for 366 days straight (remember it’s a leap year). He set a time limit of 30 - 60 minutes for each day’s design and mediums can range from “scrap and sketches to photos, typographic experiments and random creative masturbation.” It is pretty much like an online sketchbook, open for all to see and comment on. I especially like his January 5th photomanipulation pictured below.

Good luck Jonas, I hope you make it through the whole year!

Rands knows nerds and what it takes to live with them. It sounds like his post The Nerd Handbook comes from first hand experience but it describes me pretty well. Take the opening sentence:

“A nerd needs a project because a nerd builds stuff. All the time. Those lulls in the conversation over dinner? That’s the nerd working on his project in his head.”

I thought everyone constantly mulled over projects in their head?

Rand goes into further details about a nerd’s relation to the computer, why we nerds build little caves to be tucked away from society, our quest for absorbing information, and why nerds generally dislike social situations. Yup, I can relate to all of this and if you ever wanted to get a peak inside me to see how I tick, then I suggest cracking open The Nerd Handbook.

I have always been struck by this painting of a business man hopping on a pogo stick with his briefcase in hand. Some days when I am walking from the metro to work I think “It would be so awesome to do this on a pogo stick, just like in the painting.” But then I would have to wear a suit everyday to heighten the outrageousness of the idea. People generally don’t expect suit-wearing, briefcase-toting business folk to be hopping down the street like a 12 year old kid. That’s what makes it interesting.

Of course most of my commute is spent underground in a train that has a premium on space and managing a pogo stick would be a big hassle. I guess if I ever get a job where I can walk the whole way to the office I will trade in my sneakers for some wing tips and a pin stripe suit to go along with my visual gag.

Prints of this painting are available at egoodwinart’s online art store.