J’ai le cafard

It’s always tickled me that the French phrase avoir le cafard (to be down in the dumps, have a case of the blues) literally means to “have the cockroach”. Which is a neat segue neatly into a collection of animated short films by this year’s students at the Arles Ecole d’Enseignement supérieur spécialisées en infographie [via MetaFilter].

You can watch or download the films from here and there’s more information about the students on this page. I’m trying to go back and watch films from previous years but the site navigation sucks, it hasn’t been coded for Firefox and is currently hanging and about to crash methinks. Anyway, don’t let that stop you enjoying the work, there are some gems in there.

Favourites so far are Edna by Thomas Guisiano and Matthieu Rey – Charlie Chaplin (literally) in the movies and the much darker Cafard by Paul Jacamon, Thomas Léonard and Guillaume Marques. I’m off to watch some more.

Update: There’s a lovely little film called Léontine by Claire Courtois and Fabienne Mouillac which has its own website , including a gallery of stills, storyboard extracts, a lot of sketches and colour research. Excellent.

There’s also a page of links to some of the other films that might be easier to navigate.

Staying with the school site, here are links to films from previous years:

• 2004 films and the student information.
• 2003 films and the student information.
• 2002 films and student information.

Other means of navigation: If you’re on the student page and see a thumbnail of a film that looks interesting, you can click on that thumbnail to get the names of the student filmmaker(s) in the right hand side of the screen. If you then click on one of the + d’infos buttons under each student, you’ll see a popup window. Click on the fim thumbnail there and it’ll take you to the film. I take it they’re not hoping to win any prizes for web design?

Later that night…
People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones – I’ve just realised that there’s an English version of the site too.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 27th, 2005 at 10:42 and is filed under Creativity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.