Animated Inspiration: Arktika

Here's another nice short from Anatoly Belikov. While I like the contrast between the rigid, geometric icebergs and the soft, curved, rippling water, this whole animation looks like an exercise in special effects software (according to his Vimeo page notes, he created the animation using Maya and Nuke). The animation in the main character looks a little slow and stiff--kind of like what you see when a student is learning character animation and is starting to work out timing issues. Although based upon the motion of the thrown piece of ice, Belikov could be aiming for a slow-motion effect in his character sequence. Given that I'm a fan of the Mind's Eye films and that whole late '80's - early '90's style of limited 3d animation, Anatoly's short appeals to my sensibilities. The music and visuals mesh nicely and leave me with a feeling of nostalgia for those days when I was programming my animations in POVRay using graph paper, primitives, and limited boolean operations, while experimenting with writing my own ray tracing algorithms.


arktika from Anatoly Belikov on Vimeo.