In the small but intense sub-genre of interpreting Hunter S. Thompson’s words for moving image, nothing I know of captures the manic, drug-fueled rant and relentless visual onslaught it deserves better than this branded work by Ryan Honey and the team at BUCK. A labor of love for a good cause, the spot deploys the full animator’s toolkit with complete abandon and still feels fresh and irreverent 14 years later.
Guest Gallery: Stephen Price, Stash Media
Brand Film: Good Books - Metamorphosis (2012)
Stephen Price is co-founder and CD of Stash Media Inc. and the executive editor of Stash Magazine and the Stash Permanent Collection:
The Stash crew and I have had the pleasure of featuring almost 7,000 films in the Stash Permanent Collection since 2005. Although choosing the clips to share here was fun, trimming the short list to seven required real discipline.
This final line up (presented in chronological order by the date of publication) reflects both my respect for the talent behind a wide range of motion design, animation, and VFX projects as well as my attraction to work that feels timeless.
Brand film: Dumb Ways to Die (2012)
A magical mix of music and motion, it’s impossible to overstate the influence Julian Frost’s jaunty, three-minute black comedy has had in commercial media since its release in 2012. It’s also the rare viral piece that young children can sing along to with their grandparents. The piece was such a hit at the time, we staged a screening sung by a full children’s choir at that year’s Promax/BDA show in LA for an audience of 2,500.
Brand Film: Greenpeace - New Bees (2014)
Only four years after winning Best in Show at SIGGRAPH 2010 for their student film Loom, the CG directing collective Polynoid dropped this film for Greenpeace and forever changed my expectations of what VFX storytelling could be. As a whole, the clip manages to balance irony/sarcasm with the earnestness of the copy and VO so well that the work is often mistaken as a commercial for actual robotic bees.
Short Film: Jinxy Jenkins - Lucky Lou (2014)
Ringling College students Michael Bidinger and Michelle Kwon hit each and every beat perfectly in their graduation film, a four-minute romantic comedy that constantly surprises and never panders. While the film certainly stands on its own merits, one of the reasons it stood out for me so strongly when released was the undisputed dominance of French animation schools at the time. For many in the US animation industry, Jinxy Jenkins, Lucky Lou was more than a great student film, it was also a sigh of relief.
TV Series Titles: Man In The High Castle (2015)
Patrick Clair and creative partner Raoul Marks have dominated the art and craft of TV series titles since their first EMMY win in 2014 for True Detective. Two years later they won again for Man in the High Castle with a 68-second sequence that I never tire of watching and never skipped while binging the series. It remains a singular, chilling masterclass in channeling quiet power and melancholy with motion design.
Game Trailer: Watch Dogs Legion: Tipping Point (2020)
Stash has followed Spanish director/animator/painter/iconoclast Alberto Mielgo since 2010 and watched with delight as he subsequently collected multiple Emmy’s and then an Oscar in 2022, the same year he dominated S3 of Love, Death & Robots with his landmark Jibaro short film. For me, this game trailer is a mini-masterclass in the visceral, expressionist animation style he pioneered and takes on a new level of craft when examining the action sequences frame-by-frame.
Brand Film: Rover - To My Hooman (2023)
With advertising and design work becoming more cynical and homogenous, this eccentric and surprisingly emotional work from Giant Ant hit me like a quiet earthquake. While boldly quirky choices in animation style, VO, and music mark this as one of the most creatively brave commercial projects Stash has published, the fact that its narrative and underlying charm appeal to all ages (like Dumb Ways to Die), also makes it one of the most remarkable.
