BENT IMAGE LAB (or BENT) is a production company and animation studio specializing in story development, television, commercials, visual effects, music videos, short films, experimental techniques and tech development in augmented reality (AR). Located in Portland, Oregon, the company was founded in 2002 by partners David Daniels, Ray Di Carlo, and Chel White.
Beginning in 2010, the studio began the production and development of television projects, including half hour animated holiday specials for the Hallmark Channel and animated segments for Portlandia. The company is also known for its visual effects work in motion pictures and television, as seen in Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park, Restless and Milk, in Todd Haynes' I'm Not There, as well as NBC's Grimm (TV Series). Since 2014, the studio has been developing augmented reality (AR) technology and plans to launch their convergent computer vision library in fall of 2019.
Work and techniques
Bent Image Lab is known largely for its stop motion animation, CGI/computer animation, character design, and multi-technique projects.
Bent's multi-technique approach can be seen in the Modest Mouse music video Whale Song (director Nando Costa), the Thom Yorke music video Harrowdown Hill (director Chel White), the Coca-Cola ad Hidden Formula, the Lux soap ad Provocateur, a commercial for Kellogg's Rice Krispies
One early and notable example of a BENT stop motion project is Blue Christmas (a.k.a. Santa and the States) (season 30, episode 8), a parody short for Robert Smigel's Saturday TV Funhouse on Saturday Night Live. The short, airing December 18, 2004, was directed by Bent co-founder Chel White, written by Robert Smigel and Michelle Saks Smigel with additional material by Rich Blomquist, Stephen Colbert, Scott Jacobson, and Matt O'Brien; voices by Maya Rudolph, Amy Poehler, Erik Bergmann, and Robert Smigel. The short is a parody of the 1964 holiday TV special Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Bent Image Lab has replicated the same style and original characters in television advertisements for AT&T, AFLAC, Bing, and in a series of 2014 holiday promos for CBS commemorating the 50th anniversary of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. In 2016, the studio produced a ten-minute remake of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer as a 4D attraction film for SimEx-Iwerks. Another significant stop motion project is Jingle All the Way (TV special), a holiday special for Hallmark Channel. Other notable BENT stop-motion productions include director Rob Shaw's Rats segments for the IFC show Portlandia, and commercials for Legos, Gatorade, Lux, OfficeMax
BENT's CGI work can be seen in the 2015 Annie Awards nominated Polariffic (director Rob Shaw), as well as in their commercials for Honda, Nike, Coca-Cola, Koodo, Nabisco, Puffs, and the American Lung Association. An example of the studio's hand drawn animation can be seen in the animated sequences of David Oyelowo's feature film, The Water Man (2020).
Founders and directors
Bent Image Lab co-founder and director David Daniels invented an animation technique he termed Strata-cut, a unique form of clay animation in which internally packed "loaves" of clay are animated in thin slices, revealing the movement of the pre-sculpted images within. The technique of strata-cut was first used in Daniels' 1985 short film, Buzz Box, then later in animated segments of the Pee Wee's Playhouse series during the mid-90s, and in the music video for Big Time by Peter Gabriel (1986). In September 2016, Daniels gave a demonstration of his unique Strata-cut technique at the Anthology Film Archives in New York City. Before co-founding Bent Image Lab, David Daniels was a director at the Will Vinton Studios, where he helmed commercial projects for M&M's, Levi's, Fanta and broadcast promos Fox NFL.