La Crisis Anima is a web site I found recently by an animator from Spain named Juan Soto. Juan posted images and videos from his award winning shorts, essentially promoting himself - but making a nice presentation of his work for everyone to see. The site is in Spanish, but clicking around is easy enough to find some great stuff.

Check out his site by clicking here.

Hi fans of Animate Clay, it was a long three weeks that I was away in the Philippines, visiting my wifes family abroad. Luckily we are all back safe and sound which is the most important thing, but this is now the next phase for this site.

The plan is to complete the transfer of articles from our current site to the brand new site which is nearly completed. Once that happens I will most likely beta test it and we will go live with it so everyone can take advantage of the news features. The goal is to do this in June, but it will depend on a lot of things. We are also going to move to a new host, another big thing we will try to complete soon!

So to make a long story short, things will be a thousand times better once we can complete the new page. For now the store has all the items we removed such as puppet building supplies and armature kits. I will also be answering e-mails I couldnt get to while I was away as soon as I can.

Adriana Sanchez has created an interesting, dark and moody film called Bri Bri Bri. The sets, puppet designs and lighting all work well together to tell the story. You see, time is short - and the distracting bird is slowing down the main characters work. What will he do to solve the problem? Watch Adrianas film on Vimeo to find out.

Click Here to Watch

Marni from Sneak Attack Media wrote and gave us some fun videos to watch that her marketing company took part in. Its a video called Snobby Little Elf, and seems like an innocent clay animation. But it's cleverly meant to appear that way on purpose! Marni work with a band called Morningwood and the singer, Chantal recently taught herself a bit about claymation and made a video for one of their songs, Snobby Little Elf. They also made a behind the scenes video on how it was all done.

Watch Snobby Little Elf on YouTube here.
Watch the behind the scenes video here.
Visit Sneak Attack Medias official web site here.

Not to dissapoint anyone by taking a brief break from news writing to tend to site changes - I found some great stuff to read through. Famous Monsters of Filmland is a magazine that used to promote stop motion and hand craft film arts for many years. Phil Kim who is now running the new web site and online version of the magazine plans to promote stop motion into the digital age according to what he has said.

Phil is also promoting Ray Harryhausens 90th birthday by creating some festival/convention of sorts. But for now, it is hard to get information from their site about it. It is all being spoken about quietly but the promotion isnt really out in the open just yet.

There are three really good articles on the FM web site commemorating some of stop motions biggest stars, and the hardest working guys behind the scenes. You can read all three below:

Phil Tippett
Jim Aupperle
Harry Walton