It’s not a stretch to imagine that there’s polluted water in the UK, but I’d never assumed there were surfers. And sure enough, there’s Surfers Against Sewage (SAS), a British organization that combats the awful pollution that ruins surfing, swimming, diving or any other recreational watersport. SAS recently teamed up with Treat Studios, a collective of 6 animators livin in London, for a series of animated shorts bringing attention to the topic. They’re actually part of a feature-length film by Richard Stewart that’s being released with Surfer’s Path magazine. Here’s the first one, and a second can be seen over at Vimeo.

Mark Denton and Seth Watkins directed this 3-minute homage to British advertising, titled Adland. It was released by Creative Circle as part of their annual awards program. Denton is the outgoing president of Creative Circle, and you can read about his experience over at shots.net. Like Logorama, the piece features over 80 advertising references, but all of these are British. For instance, the first homage is to Ridley Scott’s Hovis ad (inset). The piece was produced by Coy Communications and the animation was completed by A Large Evil Corporation. The creative concept was originated by Mark Fairbanks, Paul Pateman and Mike Nicholson at AMV BBDO.

UK animator Milo Waterfield, has finished a new short film. Lobster Club is an allegorical story of a sex tourist on holiday “in an unidentified Mediterranean country where he is lured into an unusual gentlemen’s club.” Here’s the trailer for the 6-minute film.

Bird Box Studio has created yet another short for BBC Comedy Extra. It’s a quickie titled Blues.

Firestep Films and Kilogramme, two UK-based production companies, teamed up to create this TV series pitch presentation for a property titled Age of Heroes. Firestep’s Steve Maher designed and directed, while John Hedley animated and composited. Here’s one of the segments they created called Goliath.

Olly Reid, a Bristol-based animation director, runs Hot Head Films along with Jacky Priddle. Prior to that, he was directing ads for Aardman Animations, amongst others. His latest creation is a short film titled Deus, and Reid bills it as “an unusual look at creativity.” Not sure what’s happening in this clip, but I think I love it. Here’s a teaser trailer:

To produce Wes Anderson’s stop-motion feature Fantastic Mr. Fox, a total of 29 film units were going at once at 3 Mills Studio in London. They used Stage C, where much of Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride was filmed. Animators on the film brought with them years of experience on other stop-motion features. Daniel Alderson worked on $9.99, Andy Biddle animated on Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit and artists Brian Leif Hansen, Malcolm Lamont, Jens Jonathan Gulliksen, Anthony Farquhar-Smith and Peter Dodd (amongst others) all animated on Corpse Bride. Lastly, animation supervisor Mark Waring worked on Corpse Bride, so the easy answer to “Who Animated Fantastic Mr. Fox?” is – much of the crew from Corpse Bride.

Here’s some behind-the-scenes clips to give you an idea of how it’s pulled together: