Nervo and Barbarian Group for FOX Japan
Nervo (Nando Costa’s design and animation shop) created a series of dark and spooky IDs for FOX Movies, a new sci-fi and horror channel launched in Japan and Argentina.
My favorites are the second and third from the bottom, which were completed with the help of Robert Hodgin of The Barbarian Group. Here’s the skinny from Flight 404, Robert’s Processing blog:
What he needed from us was videos of flocking behavior. He had seen the previous experiments I have done with perlin noise flocking and thought it would work well for this project. All he wanted was a couple videos of flocking using a 3D crow (or is it a raven) he would provide. Simple enough. But given the tight deadline, the thought of doing a render and posting it and waiting for approval or changes and then implementing the changes then rerendering and reposting, etc… Well, it just didn’t make sense for this project. So we decided to try something different.
That “something different” was writing an application in Processing that Nando could use to build his own customizable flocking behavior. By creating reusable software to solve the problem, the Barbarian Group gave Nervo more options than one-off animations could provide. Software engines also encourage experimentation and creative play.
If you caught Motion Theory’s presentation at OFFF NYC, you know they did something similar for their NYC Tourism spot. To pull-off the transition from Van Gogh’s Starry Night to Central Park, they rolled their own paint simulation software. It’s beautiful stuff, and as an added bonus, with a few tweaks it can be used for future projects as well.
For those of you who want to learn more about Processing, there are now two good books available: one written by Ben Fry and Casey Reas, the creators of Processing, and one from Friends of Ed.
+ posted by
justin @
11:07 AM December 1, 2007
Thanks for the great post.
Wasn’t this posted recently here under the title “Nervo updates”?
http://www.trapcode.com/movies/bbb.mov
At Marc B. — Hmm…yeah, back in Oct, but I don’t think the FOX stuff was on there at that time. I also wasn’t aware of the Processing connection.
automate *.
@Marc B:
So, what’s the point about the trapcode link? Is it meant to show people particular, or do you want to say that everybody using particle systems (or, like in this case, even codes their own) rips off trapcode?
http://www.trapcode-people.net/filedetails.php?fileid=110
You might have even used it for your advanced beauty.
Blatant plugin usage is lame. That’s all, no offense please. Altough i’m not saying nervo or barbarian did it. It looks cool. The particles are similiar though.
@Marc B:
You might wanna read through the making of of this nervo thing on Robert’s Page before you comment on it.
I saw the post which looks like my Advanced Beauty piece as a comment to it somewhere, didn’t know it before. It’s pretty obvious that the Advanced Beauty piece is some kind of particle system. Does it matter which software was used?
I would say if you look on it from this perspective you miss out a lot of beautiful experiences.
@Marc B.:
Seems like you only have ignorant things to say for most every post. I can’t even read comments any more because you annoy me so much.