Simple is beautiful. In Lights, Paranoid US and new SF-based agency, DOJO, keeps it simple and retells the classic story of boy meets girl. With director Sophie Gateau at the helm, the piece dually functions as an advert for LG and a music video —similarly named— for electropop artist, LIGHTS.
At the heart of it, the piece is a canny take on an old story —fancying a straightforward approach to create something elaborate, yet deceptively simple. Technically, the piece is exquisitely executed —so well that, on multiple viewings— the animated images appear to be the result of practical effects. The kicker is that it wasn’t. In a most spectacular display of CG stagecraft, Gateau, with a background in CG and motion graphics, utilized her skillset to the utmost degree. To sum it up:
“Utilizing motion control to shoot the available 45 pre-production models , Sophie shot twenty passes–moving the phones along in each pass. The Paranoid Design Studio team then assembled the passes, tracked animated characters and environmental drawings, and composited them into the scenes.”
Brought to life by Blur Studio, it features Poison Ivy, Wonder Woman, Metallo, The Green Lantern, Giganta, Black Adam, Batman, The Flash, Cyborg, Lex Luthor, Deathstroke, Artemis, The Joker, Harley Queen, Superman and Brainiac (…phew!) all together, epically battling it out on a post-apocalyptic Earth.
With pure balls to the wall awesomeness including Superman with red eyes; it just doesn’t get more badass than this! If only DC could make their features as good as their game trailers…
Here’s three four pieces of odd, “creature-driven” music (yes they’re still relevant) video work from some of our favorites to get your Wednesday going.
First up, the legend, Tom Kuntz, makes a return to music videos after a hiatus that involved picking up an Emmy for his hugely successful Old Spice work. For MGMT, this piece lacks none Tom’s signature quirk, but uses it to summon tears versus laughter — well maybe a few laughs.
This second vid is now a couple weeks old, but a fitting companion to Kuntz’s. Andrea Nilsson, a director who continues to secure his rank in the upper echelon of video directors. With a current VMA nomination for his last MGMT vid, this piece for Yeasayer pits pathos and the absurd against each other with a brilliant balance that continues to become Nilsson’s signature in storytelling.
This late edition just came in it and seemed it had to join the lot. Daniel Fickle and his crew at Two Penguin Productions continue the thread with their video for Portland Cello Project. (Thanks for the tip, Magee)
On a somewhat light note, Colonel Blimp and JMD bring you talking babies (with mustaches) — enough said.
\’th`ing\ p`1t\
Noun
An entity, an idea, or a quality perceived, known, or thought to have its own existence.
Thing Pit is a traveling guerrilla art projection by artist Taras Hrabowsky. It’s also a beautifully composited project full of crushing decay, fluid destruction and complete insanity. Much can be said about the possibility of a black hole universe (man made or not). What Thing Pit attempts to create is…
a. a concealed danger or difficulty
b. guerilla projection made in opposition to a static view of our surroundings
c. a re-presentation of a coming together / an envirotron of differentiation
d. the commonly overlooked exultation in between
More artistic visual than commercial value, Thing Pit uses the technology to disorient, distort and confuse the viewer into a state of endless bliss.
Last night, it seemed like everyone in NYC was talking (and tweeting) about one thing: The Standard Hotel. Funded by Target, Mother NY and LEGS took over the Standard as the stage for a Kaleidoscopic Fashion Spectacular — an LED light and fashion show with enormous ambition and success.
Hot off of VMA nominations for their Florence and the Machine video, LEGS continues to blur the line defining the modern director. This latest feat turned 155 rooms (with 66 dancers inside) into pixels, backed by a 30 piece orchestra, as they animated the hotel’s southern facade to bring a live experience to the streets. In attempt an artistic democracy, Target even distributed 1,500 binoculars and had the music available on a toll-free number for those not close enough to hear.
Aside from the exceptional creative and production merits of this work, it’s encouraging to see brands like Target stepping up and financing non-traditional curation (by Mother NY) and innovation much like Intel has entrusted VICE with it’s currently touring Creators Project. As old mediums retire, new ones are born and those who find ways to tell stories within new structures will continue to push our “blurring” industry forward whilst finding new ways to create.
Check out some photos as we await more video and extras about the night and feel free to share any content you may have captured in the comments.
The folks over at Everynone just released a new addition to their series of shorts in collaboration with NPR & WNYC’s Radiolab – an evocative interpretation of communication which explores the role that language plays in our perception and understanding of the world: WORDS.
As a “bonus video” to reflect Radiolab’s recent subject matter of the same title, Everynone composed an extremely heartfelt visual array…a menagerie of everyday snapshots reflecting the human condition, presented symbiotically through masterful editing and an empathetic score. Each image runs beautifully into one another creating a warm lyricism that not only pays tribute to the minutia of our daily lives, but weaves together a story that represents our society as a whole, tangential only through our assigned definitions of each part.
Everynone was kind enough to elaborate on their process:
“Our friends at Radiolab were making a show about ‘words’, and they wanted us to make a companion video. Upon hearing that the subject for the show would be ‘words’, we immediately thought of the big books, the dictionary and thesaurus. From there, we decided that we’d make some sort of visualizations of these books. Pretty early on, we knew it’d play quite like a game, you could call it a “game-film”. Starting with “play”, we simultaneously created and connected the dots, back and forth between dictionary and thesaurus.
It took a good week to write the piece out, and about a month to shoot and edit. There were a fair amount of changes along the way, but the entire piece existed, for the most part, on paper. Of course, when working in a realm of “planned non-fiction”, there are surprises everywhere. Every person in the piece is a non-actor. We made lots of phone calls and pulled tons of strangers off the street to get the subjects and actions we wanted.
To keep the whole flow fresh, we played with the detail and branches of the word associations, and the transitions between words became our glue.
It was a new way to approach the filmmaking process, and it made the whole thing fun and exciting. If you listen to Radiolab, you’ll find that sort of curiousity and positive energy is gushing, so it was a breeze for us to play with it.”
Lastly, as you all probably know by now, Radiolab is awesome. Jad Abumrad & Robert Krulwich (and team) consistently create a beautiful musicality of scientific exploration, unique sound design, and affable storytelling – a program more lucid than most visual media, in my opinion – and their latest presentation doesn’t miss a beat. It’s an exploration into the role that structured language plays into our perception of ourselves and the world around us. Be sure to check out Radiolab’s Words following Everynone’s kickass supplement.
Meticulously designed and animated, the spots are an ode to Pams’ food products. Filled with simple, food-shaped characters they live in a vintage, yet contemporary world. The combination and contrast of analog/digital textures and simple 3D characters that seamlessly blend into 2D make for a friendly, home-cooked food aesthetic, reminiscent of the friendliness of your local greengrocer. (Make sure to begin from “For The Love of Food” and continue on to the other two shorter spots.)
Jonny was kind enough to answer a few questions about the project. Read the Q&A here.
MK12 has just released another in-house project, a short film called TELEPHONEME. It brings the idea of “language working as a double-agent, carrying a hidden meaning with it for reasons yet-unknown” (there’s a PDF with more details in the cool site!).
The movie expertly combines live action with animation in the collective’s unique style, with neatly composited shapes and type, aged-film textures, and a beautiful nostalgic color palette. TELEPHONEME synthesizes a lot of MK12′s aesthetic, which will definitely keep on inspiring crowds of Motion Designers throughout the world.
MK12′s co-founder Ben Radatz kindly shared some insights about the project:
TELEPHONEME came about after we’d begun writing a short about how the alphabet was actually a “trojan horse” with coded messages and symbols, designed by a shadow group intent on keeping the rest of us down. While writing the piece we came across a Bell Labs-funded educational film called “The Alphabet Conspiracy,” which had pretty much the same content we were writing into our version. So we instead appropriated the voiceover and re-mixed it into a slightly darker version of itself. The voice is that of Frank Baxter, aka Dr. Research, a well-known figure in the educational film world. And, he tweets! We developed a typeface called “Chadwick” which we envisioned as a “root font” of sorts – a theoretically perfect and balanced font that concerned itself more with technical execution than visual aesthetics. This was the font that we used throughout the piece, and we set up a pretty rigid set of guidelines for it’s use. It’s not something that’s likely to be picked up on, but it made a good foundation for the rest of the piece. While voiceover is borrowed from the original film, the sound design was done in-house, borrowing from analog sources and mixing them into a very sight-for-see composition.
Between Bears, created by Eran Hilleli at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, is a film beyond its years as a student piece and occupies a distinctive place in the spectrum of contemporary, short subject animation.
Unto itself, nearly every frame is a moving illustration. The style of the piece reduces forms to a graphical simplicity, making the visual language of the film both graceful and crude. As your eyes waft over a succession of thoughtfully composed landscapes, negative space helps to establish a vivid sense of solitary amongst the characters—sequestered, but coming to terms with a world in surrounding desolation.
Together, through a muted palette of analogous colors, the graphical beauty of the film—for some—may pull ahead of the equally abstract, yet solemn narrative, but comparatively, while the literal message of the piece may be open for interpretation, the bleak transgression of visuals paint a stark reality.
Natural and man-made objects on a spin cycle accumulate, disintegrate, and multiply in Andy Kennedy‘s short film, Accumulonimbus. The material is clay, but its movement is lively and effortless. Fun soundtrack by Andy as well!
Also check out the rubber molds, flash guides, and diy ceiling camera rig in the behind the scenes material.
Forget your plug-ins and check out Chris Graf’s fx reel for some nice effects done frame by frame. I especially like the personality added to a simple candle flame animation.
