Cartoon Brew pointed to the short film Pivot last night.

It's an interesting play on role reversal, but the design and animation is very stylized. It's almost a bit of a throwback, with what resembles low polygon models. This lets them keep the colors flat, but it's how stylized the animation is that I think is the neato part. It looks like they take a bit of inspiration from Frank Miller's black and white stuff, but used much more effectively in motion than the movie adaptations of his work. The "villain" is mostly only represented by his monstrous shadow that leaps from wall to wall. Very cool.

Love the Saul Bass-type opening titles, too.

cool find
that was very good
thanks

Very cool! Finding a style that leaves alot to the imagination is very liberating and allows you use simple suggestions of objects or events without spending days, months, years on detailing. This makes everything so much more spontaneous and open to experiment. They seem to have had a ball experimenting during the making of this short.

The style of "Pivot" is very refreshing but after viewing it a couple of times I started to think that the main character's face could be a little better, more defined but still stylized. I wouldn't change anything else. The set, lighting, animation, layout, editing, sound and pace are all superb but I would just have prefered a more empathetic face I think. It might just be the eyes that bothered me. The shots of the reflections in the eyes of one of the characters made me think that I was just looking at a proxy in an animatic. It lost my engagement for a few seconds.

The flat style reminded me of Anzovin Studio's "Duel" in parts, though taken to a much more abstract level. Pivot has alot of snappy, jazzy stuff going on that would work great in Titles and Credits.

Nice find, Mark!

What a great movie. I loved the animation style.

Cheers