“The Summoning of the Skylark” (2015) is the first short film created by Cool 3D World. It follows a mysterious female entity who recruits three beings to help summon a holy skylark. Throughout their ritual, the music intensifies while bodies and faces morph or distort, developing animalistic features. When these entities reach their final form, a layer of the grotesque digital world is peeled back to reveal a special bond between these menacing creatures.
The piece was created in now-dated software, but it served as a roadmap for themes and ideas that would be explored at great length in Cool 3D World’s work in the years following. Magic, fantasy, distorted realities, humor, and the marriage of music with animation are all essential to the creation of Cool 3D World films.
Cool 3D World is a collaborative multimedia project comprising digital artists Brian Tessler (b. 1989) and Jon Baken (b. 1988) that serves as a space for animated 3D content as well as original music and sound design. Founded in 2015, Cool 3D World is best known for the creation of precisely animated, alternative universes filled with grotesque, often nightmarish narratives. Humanoids and animals act out uncanny scenes in distorted worlds, lifting the veil on secret behaviors and private odysseys. Pairing 3D imagery and haunting audio, Cool 3D World’s videos emerge as open-ended streams of consciousness.
Having started out on the short-looped video platform Vine, the artists program music and graphic together for each work, generating intricate sequences. With their distinctive artistic language and surreal creations, Cool 3D World have established themselves among the most-followed 3D artists on social media. They are based in Brooklyn.