Nick Fox-Gieg is an animator and video artist currently living in the Netherlands. His latest work is a short animated in Flash titled The Foxhole Manifesto, a 4:30 minute film featuring audio by poet Jeffrey McDaniel. The short is below, but I recommend going to his website for a higher-quality video version.

Sylvain Marc is a 24-year old animator and director out of Paris who has a bright future ahead of him. His character design skills are world-class, as you can see in his 3D-animated 2006 school project Cocotte Minute (co-directed with 5 others), and his sense for timing and humor leave little doubt about his career potential.

In 2005, as part of an exercise at Gobelins, the animation school in France, he created a 2D short for CanalJ, a children’s TV channel. He employed Flash to create this piece which is titled La soupe à l’engrais or Fertilizer soup.

Fertilizer Soup was accepted to eight festivals including Ottawa, Siggraph and Annecy 2006.

For more, check out Sylvain’s blog and his character designs from Cocette Minute.

Jake Macher, one of the talented animators behind the MSTRKRFT music video featured here in July of 2006, is quite the FX whiz. He’s been creating glass-shatters, explosions and lens flares for Collideascope Animation for years now – all in Flash. According to Ron Doucet, an animation director at Collideascope, Macher’s FX sequences often involve over a hundred layers.

John Kricfalusi, the creator of The Ren and Stimpy Show, has teamed up with Raketu, the VOIP provider, to produce a few new Flash-animated cartoons.

On the Raketu.com website, you can now see George Liquor, Sody Pop and Bobby Bigloaf promoting different aspects of Raketu’s product line.

John K has been chronicling his latest project on his extremely popular blog All Kinds of Stuff. He recently posted a short Quicktime file of the mouth cycles from the Bobby Bigloaf short. For anyone trying to harness the wonders of limited animation, look no further. Using Roger Ramjet as an example, John offers a clinic in how to make every drawing count.

Nina Paley, a self-professed “cynical cartoonist” turned independent animator, began working on Sita Sings the Blues in December of 2004. This week Paley unveiled her first trailer for this 72-minute film, which she has been slowly releasing in sections, chapter by chapter.

Paley is aiming to finish the film by 2008, but in the meantime, enjoy some of her other award-winning films like Stork or my personal favorite Fetch!.