WORDS

“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.”

TiRA for ASTRA

From London-based This is Real Art comes a project that hits all my soft spots:  space tech, information graphics, and a reserved, modern design aesthetic.

TiRA created a collection of seven documentary films for Astra – one of the world’s largest satellite operator’s, in concert (but not in direct relation) with the development and planned launch of their largest and most advanced satellite, Astra 3B – to be used for education and marketing.  The films describe everything one needs to know about the operation of a satellite: History, Physics, Control, Launch, Why We Need Satellites, Business, and The Future.

Astra is a heavyweight in providing communications to major European markets – from radio and broadcast to broadband and 3D technologies.  Thus, with society’s ever-increasing reliance on these services (i.e. broadband, 3D) and Astra’s continued growth into emerging markets, it’s no surprise to see this type of subject given this much care.

As partner and Creative Director at This is Real Art, Paul Belford has proven to be a force in the advertising world – harkening the likes of Rand, Krone or Glaser – and it shows once again in his directorial role for this project.  Reflecting seemingly innate refined design sensibilities, Paul takes a technically astronomic and thus potentially mind-numbing subject and whittles it down into a form that’s both translucently and attractively explicated – a presentation that would make Edward Tufte proud.

Motionographer was able to catch up with Paul at This Is Real Art for a more detailed look into the process.
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