Aardman’s Merlin Crossingham has thrown down the gauntlet to any other animators who have a week of free time on their hands and are crazy enough to want to stay in the studio instead of going on holiday. This 1:30 minute short, titled Crained, was shot in less than one week by only two artists who animated on plasticine on glass. Crossingham, a stop-motion specialist, has animated on a number of Aardman’s feature-length films like Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit and Chicken Run.

Over 6,000 individual paintings were meticulously created over the course of two years to create this unique looking student film, titled Khoda. It was directed by Reza Dolatabadi and animated by Adam Thomson.

Oktapodi truly deserves all the festival prizes and accolades it’s been getting these past few months. When the winning team of students from the Paris-based animation school Gobelins walked on stage at SIGGRAPH to accept the Audience Prize and the Best of Show Award, it marked a culmination of an intense journey for the talented crew. Have a look at the results:

Get the hi-res Quicktime version here.

On the official site, you can see a short ‘making of’ video that reveals some concept art and designs.

The film was created and directed by Julien Bocabeille, Francois-Xavier Chanioux, Olivier Delabarre, Thierry Marchand, Quentin Marmier, and Emud Mokhberi. Oktapodi was produced through the prestigious Parisian school Gobelins L’Ecole de L’Image, a visual arts college funded by the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Paris, which provides training in various formats, but is best known for the Cinéma Department of Animation. It is here that the school archives many of the group films created by its students of the past 7 graduating years.

Now soak up some early development art by co-director, Emud Mokhberi: