This thing has been burning up the interwebs. It’s a shot-for-shot recreation of the famous light cycle race form Tron, made with cardboard and stop-action.

Here’s the original for reference:

Thanks to Lilian and Ryan for the tips!

Maxim Zhestkov has recently created a new website and video installation. Here are Maxim’s thoughts on his work: “This time I wanted to make something deep and capacious. To make aura and situation in progress. A game of energy and breathe of life. So that is how i see cosmic tragedy.”

Also, I would like to note how beautiful the sound design is. Listening to all those space-rattling noises and heartbeats with the visuals makes it truly a masterpiece!

OneDotZero and MTV’s Bloom competition has unveiled their winners’ films online. The contest involved submitting treatments on the Bloom brief which were judged on “innovation, style, and creative interpretation” and selected last May. The interesting thing is that once selected the winners’ were all commissioned to make the films. (Imagine that, paying for content!) The films are all done and were unveiled last week in London.

The ten films all explore the ideas of country and community through various animation techniques and aesthetic styles. A lot of the films are really great! We’ve featured a few of the winners here on Motionographer before: Italy’s Quayola and the Holograms from France, pictured above. Also check out P. Adamski and K. Kijek’s film from Poland and Lulu Li’s piece about Chinese gymnastics. You can read all the winning treatments online as well.

Debris from More Soon on Vimeo.

We posted More Soon, the personal site of Hi-Res art director Carl Burgess, as a Quickie back in February. But when I saw his stuff again over at Delicious Ghost, I thought it might be fun to follow up with a short interview.

Who are you?

My name is Carl Burgess I currently work as Art Director at Hi-Res.

I grew up in the Peak District in the North of England. I moved to London in 2000 where I studied for my Masters degree at Central Saint Martins. Shortly after I got an internship at Hi-Res and I have been there ever since.

I started More Soon about three years ago, it started as more of a place to show my experiments and developments. The focus has changed over the last couple of years to creating more finished pieces.

How long have you been with Hi-Res?

I have been at Hi-Res for about three and a half years now.. where did all that time go?

Is there overlap between More Soon and your Hi-Res work?

The work at Hi-Res and my work on More Soon are essentially quite separate but the two inevitably overlap; things I am working on at home end up creeping into a variety of projects for clients and vice versa.

How would you describe the body of work at More Soon?

A collection of individual projects and ideas that all share the same creative vision, this being to create something with feeling and emotion in whatever form it takes.

I think because design is such a service industry, there is always an element of compromise to any commercial project. This is something that I wanted to escape from when creating my personal work; the chance to be able to make something from start to finish with no restraints. It includes not being tied down to a particular style and not being worried about ‘keeping up’. This gives you the freedom in process to go anywhere you like.

As well as all of that, I’m simply interested in things that I don’t know about.

Are projects like “Debris” and “Disappointed” commissioned pieces? Or are they self-initiated projects? Put another way: Why did you create them?

My projects are a mixed bag of commissioned pieces and self initiated work.

Why create them—I think it’s important that I continue to do my independent work. It’s an outlet; an opportunity to create something not there before or to do something completely free of limitation; to be able to turn something on its head and see what happens.

Quite a lot of my work comes together as a series of experiments. There is no grand plan so to speak. I am constantly working, figuring things out, filming, taking photos etc. but not necessarily for a definite goal. I surround myself in all of this half finished matter that I have created and things just naturally pull together. It is quite an organic process, experiments feed other experiments and I just intuitively follow my instincts until I get to the point where it all falls into place.

I’ve noticed that you pay great attention to the audio aspect of your work. Any reason for that? Are you a musician or a sound designer as well, perhaps?

Audio is a really important part of the finished piece it’s like the icing on the cake but I find the process of making music quite challenging so it is always something that I avoid until the rest of the project is done.

I really enjoyed the process of working on Advanced Beauty, I spent a few months making the animation, I handed it over to Simon ‘Freeform’ and it came back with really amazing sound design, perfectly finished. Maybe I need to make a friend who happens to be a good sound designer.

You also seem to traverse the fields of motion graphics, interactive design, graphic design and sculpture with ease. (That’s true of Hi-Res, too.) I find that inspiring. It’s as though the lines between those fields don’t exist. (And I suppose in actuality, they don’t.)

I don’t consciously think about whether something is Art, Design, Sculpture etc. When I am working, I just make what feels right to me, it really doesn’t matter what form it takes.

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Those kooky kids at PandaPanther get the best projects. This time around they applied their distinctive brand of visual exuberance to the show open and interior elements of MTV Tr3s’ Top 20 show.

With a wide open brief, they concocted a series of retro-tinged live-action shots featuring cute disembodied heads. The whole thing feels bouncy and improvisational, one part Swinging 60s, one part Spanish textbook fiesta—all fun.

PandaPanther joined the Blacklist roster back in January.

Full credits

This Thursday’s After Effects New York meeting promises to be fun. Andrew Kramer of Video Copilot will be there, and Maxon will be explaining the Cinema 4D to AE workflow.

I won’t be able to make this meeting (I’ll be packing for my move up to The Big Apple), but I encourage you all to go. February’s meeting was packed, and it’s invigorating to feel that kind of nerdy energy. I picked up a few great AE tips, too. Oh, and they have free pizza and soft drinks (which is reason enough for most people to attend).

More details on the official AENY site.

Impactist (a.k.a. Kelly Meador & Daniel Elwing a.k.a. Mare Dowling) created a curious a/v puzzle for the opening of the latest *smilefaucet DVD, Undo. In their words:

With nods to late night literary advertising and a graphical homage to the covers found on Penguin published books, this opening for *smilefaucet, a serial DVD project, desires the viewer to “undo” text presented on the screen. The fictitious book titles shown are anagrams and can be solved using the graphical hints provided adjacent to them. Once solved, the resulting text concerns a contemporary idea or occurrence that many in today’s world may wish they could “undo.”

Like most of Impactist’s work, there’s more to this than at first meets the eye. In addition to creating a series of anagrams (and including a cryptology key to unlock them), Kelly and Daniel also made each of the book covers from wood. The construction of those elements alone is fascinating.

Oh, and they composed the soundtrack, too. When I grow up, I want to be like Impactist.

eatdrink do Undo, too!

While we’re on the subject of *smilefaucet, I thought this would be a good time to mention eatdrink’s quirky, hyrbid submission. You may remember eatdrink’s Observation of the Cat State here on Motionographer. This new project, like that one, shows off the sheer joy they take in simply creating for the sake of creating.

Linkage:

Visit eatdrink
Visit Impactist
Visit the *smilefaucet site

PS — Anyone figure out the anagram in the headline?

Digital Kitchen recently posted a 360 degree panoramic project they did for the MGM Mirage CityCenter in Las Vegas. These projects always require a little imagination to appreciate how they work in context, so the image below may help.

The whole point of the project is to get potential buyers excited about moving into the new CityCenter development. It works as a backdrop—a “talking point” to borrow DK’s verbiage—while agents chat up customers in the showroom area pictured above.

I like that the project alternates between sales pitchy type images (guys golfing, skyline vistas) and more artistic, metaphoric imagery like the opening champagne sequence and the moment when the two lovers are connected by a constellation. From a pure eye candy perspective, the disco ball transition just after the half-way mark must be dazzling in person.

It’s subtle work, mature work—the kind of stuff that makes me admire DK so much. If you spin through their portfolio, you’ll see everything from whizz-bang, trendy stuff to understated, restrained work like this MGM project. Audience is king; design is a means to an end, not the end in itself.

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