Baby I’m Yours by Irina Dakeva

We saw this beautiful cel-animated and aquarelle-painted music video by Irina Dakeva for Breakbot recently and wanted to find out more about the production process she used. You can tell immediately that it’s a real analog and painted work. It’s got a real energy and kinetic style of painting that is entrancing. The inventive transitions and constantly-shifting color washes go hand-in-hand with the bouncy, French pop-disco track.

Read more for a Q&A with Irina here

Johnny Kelly’s Play for YouTube

Nexus Production’s director Johnny Kelly just made this short film for YouTube Play, an exhibition that YouTube and the Guggenheim Museum in NYC are calling “a Biennial of Creative Video” and which you can submit or nominate your own non-commercial work to right now; submissions are open until July 31st. Johnny’s piece is top-notch, encapsulating the Youtube experience in life-size sets which reference famous art works and also run the gamut from wood-grain explosions to rocky caves to circuit-boards and geometric cityscapes, all using the familiar Youtube play button as a central motif. Johnny explained his idea in the press release from Nexus:

“I wanted to try and capture that down the rabbit hole feeling you get when watching YouTube – you start by watching something innocent like a music video, then another video catches your eye and before you know it you’ve spent your fourth hour watching videos of pandas playing pianos. From a technical point of view, it was a challenging animation assault course, with much head-scratching and figuring out along the way. I was very fortunate to be surrounded by brainiacs like production designer Graham Staughton who always had an inventive solution to any problem we came up against.”

The NY Times ran an article on the exhibition yesterday as well, which had an interesting alternative viewpoint expressed by Robert Storr, dean of the Yale University School of Art, which is well worth considering:

“It’s time to stop kidding ourselves,” Mr. Storr added. “The museum as revolving door for new talent is the enemy of art and of talent, not their friend — and the enemy of the public as well, since it refuses to actually serve that public but serves up art as if it was quick-to-spoil produce from a Fresh Direct warehouse.”

We’ll see what the Guggenheim and Youtube eventually pick to include in their show, but if they’re already onto Johnny Kelly, I think it’ll be well worth checking out. Here’s an interesting making-of video if you want to see more.

Credits:

Time Magazine covers Hollywood’s VFX Sweatshops

Rebecca Keegan, the author of a biography on James Cameron, The Futurist, and also a Variety and Time magazine correspondent, writes a mainstream media article that’s thin on any new substance but covers the main ideas behind the VFX Fairness debate for Time Magazine. Read the whole piece here.

“Fundamentally, visual effects is a crappy business,” James Cameron told me … “You don’t make much of a margin. A good year for us was 5%. Sure, we were doing huge volume but at a low margin.”

Also listen to a podcast of an interview Rebecca Keegan on her James Cameron biography with Lee Stranahan here. VFX issues start around the 13 minute mark.