I don’t seek out opera tickets all that often, but here’s a production I’m dying to see. The Nose, an opera composed by Dmitri Shostakovich, opened last Friday at the Metropolitan Opera (six performances only) in New York City, and it features giant animated projections throughout the show. William Kentridge, the South African artist, is the director and set designer on the production, and he’s also a very accomplished animator. The Nose is based on Russian Nikolai Gogol’s short story, thus the heavy influence of Soviet avant-garde constructivist artwork. Here’s some clips from the production, and below that an interview with Kentridge.

NYC-based Humble houses a “directing collaborative” they call Hydra, which is led by Sam Stephens and John Hobbs. They tackle projects that “fall outside the usual creative constraints of commercial work,” and below is just such a film. It’s titled Homunculus, which means “little human” in Latin. It includes time-lapse photography of decaying food stuff, mixed with CG animated characters created in Maya.

Karen Abad, a staffer at Vimeo.com, also helps curate Everything Animated, a popular Vimeo Channel (also check out the Lineboil Channel). Tonight at 8pm in Brooklyn she’s taking the Channel offline at Monkey Town, a dining and video performance space. There’s a $10 minimum, but the screening itself is free. Hopefully they’ll show videos like this 1930s homage from Trunk Animation, which we just spotted at Vimeo. It’s titled Dancing Jack.