Imperial Leisure: New Site, New Reel

Posted by Justin Cone

imperial.jpg

Imperial Leisure’s new reel is after my heart. The Cat Stevens soundtrack is a beautiful complement to their thoughtful work. Their reel isn’t packed full of eye candy, and I find that refreshing. The transitions from project to project are wrought with hand-crafted love, and the whole thing is perfectly paced and edited.

About the author

Justin Cone

/ justincone.com
Together with Carlos El Asmar, Justin co-founded Motionographer, F5 and The Motion Awards. He currently lives in Austin, Texas with is wife, son and fluffball of a dog. Before taking on Motionographer full-time, Justin worked in various capacities at Psyop, NBC-Universal, Apple, Adobe and SCAD.
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14 Comments

jinormous

crap

Stray

Yeah agree.Not good.

Angela

I’m not an animator, but the animation doesn’t seem to be very good at all. In fact it looks like i could’ve animated it. SOME of it just feels very wooden.

Stray

Yeah i think THA DON can animate better than this.

justin

Wow, I’m surprised by all this. I mean, I’m not surprised by the generally horrible quality of the comments (thanks for setting the tone, jinormous), but I am surprised by their negativity.

I guess I don’t think of Imperial Leisure as an animation studio, so I wasn’t looking at their work in that way.

Oh well, you win some, you lose some. Life goes on.

Stray

Yeah its all Jinormous fault.

James

I think just because it doesn’t have lots of camera moves with shakes on it followed by wipes and fancy colors doesn’t mean it’crap. I actually quite like it. I bothered looking through the other work and I’m impressed by some of that too. But that’s my opinion. :)

Yussef

i think, justin, that you are simply being wooed by seductive editing and soundtrack. the work is basically mediocre. no need to call it ‘crap’… that’s kinda childish.

they do have some strong comps here and there but as angela says the animation is really not up to crack. you don’t need flying lion crests and transforming laser robots to have a good reel, but i’ve found, over the top ‘eye candy’ reels cover up bad animation a lot better than minimalistic ones. since this one is trying to go the simple and clean route and a lot of their stuff is not so finessed, it comes off as mediocre to me.

justin

Now THAT is a proper comment. Thank you, Yussef.

limore

The work feels sophomoric in production and technique, but makes up for it when you look past the obvious hangups. The ideas have merit and the production value will most likely get stronger as they grow as a company. Their blog mentioned that they are two people, two designers. Nice pick Justin, it will be good to watch them as they build their portfolio.

brandj

The Magic Numbers piece is pretty nice.

jester

Well they have my vote. I agree with Yussef that it is refreshing to see less eye candy. After all a fool with a tool is still fool. Imperial leisure are a young house and im sure the quality of their work is mirrored by the cost. Pay more get better quality. Anyway i think they are worth keeping an eye on and I too will be keeping a watchful eye on their portfolio.

Alex

Holy haters! That wasn’t bad at all. Sure, it’s not psyop and one or two of the scenes should have probably been cut from the reel, but other than that I thought there were a couple of really interesting ideas there.

Yussef

you could say that for almost any reel published on the web right now.

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