all it a study in contrasts, or in covering all the bases. Having received raves for their 2005 "Unleashed" short for Honda, in which scores of artfully rendered characters float heavenward, Columbus, Ohio's Leftchannel Industries is now reaping accolades for its latest work, the considerably darker "Blissful".

With a score provided by Mike Patton's (ex-Faith No More) latest project Fantomas, the new clip is, according to Leftchannel's Alberto Scirocco, a vision of "the voyage to damnation, in which the damned [character] reminisces about better days - a time where he was blissful and at peace." It's a fairly harrowing piece that recalls 'Dante's Inferno', except instead of descending through assorted rings of perdition, the doomed character freefalls through a stark, black and white version of hell, populated with grotesque mouths and clawing hands, ultimately hitting the void.

"It started as a flat graphic design piece for print," says Scirocco, who came up with the concept and early designs. "The concept was already in place from the beginning, but then it was passed around and multiple people here added to the design itself... Once [it] got to the point where we were all happy with it we decided it might be worth exploring as a motion design."

The Leftchannel team of Scirocco, principal Rainer Ziehm and designers/animators Sean Conner, Nate Reese, Andrew Mark, and Chris Meister spent over 10 days hand-animating Illustrator and Photoshop illustrations, managing the project in After Effects. One main challenge was presented by the Fantomas score - Scirocco had been listening to the track "Delìrium Còrdia" while working on the piece and "it instantly felt perfect". Still, the piece of music in its entirety takes up an entire CD - "It's one track, and the track itself is about 30 minutes," explains Conner. "So we had to remix a lot of different parts of the track and custom-fit them to the piece."

Upon posting the finished clip to their site and sending word out to assorted mograph-oriented sites, online buzz grew instantly. "It really took off once it hit Motionographer.com" says Reese. "From there, it just hit the network where it would go from one site to another and spread."

"We've received so many comments from all over the globe - Hong Kong, Singapore, Russia," says Ziehm. "We're getting really emotional responses as well as compliments on the design and execution."

From here, Leftchannel has several commercial and broadcast design projects on the go, but it's what Ziehm calls the "internal pieces that are generated in pretty abstract ways" that feed the team's creativity.

"We get in the spirit of this experimental work to keep ourselves inspired," says Scirocco. "And once it gets out there, you never know how people will react."

Leftchannel Industries> http://www.leftchannel.com
Fantomas> http://www.ipecac.com