Passion Pictures’ Pete Candeland welcomes The Beatles to Rock Band

It was no surprise when I learned the new spot for The Beatles: Rockband was directed by Pete Candeland of Passion Pictures, director of The Gorillaz music videos and done the past two Rock Band openers (1 & 2).

The illustrations and designs are gorgeous, the transitions are seamless and the piece builds momentum to the very end. Not only does the energy of the piece build, but so do the complexity of the animation techniques themselves. We start off in an illustrated, cut out world and wind up in a fully immersing Psyop-esque jam fest. By the end of the video I had to keep rewinding to catch all the references.

Enjoy.

Strukt: Toca Me 2009

The talented people over at Strukt had a big act to follow after Dvein’s opening titles for last years Toca Me conference, but they pulled off something fantastic.

They took the theme “Hit by Inspiration” quite literally and ran with it. The blooming spheres visit every desaturated color of the spectrum, but still live in the same world and make me wish that tiny little balls of inspiration would fall from the sky and bonk me on the head.

Watch it here

Credits

Street Fighter IV intro

So we posted the teaser and trailer for the new Street Fighter game, and now here in the same fashion is the intro animation that runs at the beginning of the game.

Nothing new as far as the last two trailers were concerned: the style is the same, they’ve just made this one longer and a bit more epic. The painterly ink effects and grit work really well with the textures. It’s the epitome of eye-candy.

Still would love more info, but we now know that Studio4ºC and Polygon Pictures are responsible for this.

Thanks Scott

Animation Director Niko

The portfolio of London-based animation director Nicolas Lesaffre is brimming with unique design and character animation. The surreal scenes he creates are saturated with eye catching elements and attention grabbing characters that will assure you you’re seeing something new and unique.

Be sure to check out the festival traveled “Hernando”, which amazingly was created as his graduation film from Supinfocom in France.

NTROPIC for Chevy

It took an innovative mind to set up a time lapse camera at the turn of the century and keep it running all these years (har-har). The idea behind this spot is simple and elegantly executed. No fancy transformer-style builds or fly-throughs, just a well-mimicked time-lapse with visual effects lurking in the frameworks.

The scenes are packed with subtleties that make it worth watching more than once (like the group pushing their over-heated car into the service station). The resolution of the spot is a nice surprise, as one would expect a timeline of events to keep building upon itself, not regress back to the first frame, which really drives the whole concept home.

Kind of makes you wonder if gas stations will be one of the tall tales we tell our grandkids.

Director: Eric Saarinen
Production company: TWC

DK hits NYC’s South Street Sea Port

Digital Kitchen teamed up with Wexley School for Girls to create a motion graphics infused sphere that lived on NYC’s South Street Seaport, and was there to promote both the re-launch of Microsoft Windows Live as well as the 25th anniversary of Operation Smile. Visitors of the Seaport were invited to upload their faces through kiosks, which were then deployed into the animation using a custom processing applications programed by Firstborn.

This takes me all the way back to my college Survey of New Media class, and reminds me how great it is to see motion graphics in new forms of media being shared with people who wouldn’t normally have an appreciation for the kind of work we do.

Other kick-butt examples of interactive installations:
|UVA| |Graffiti Research Labs | Mikontalo Lights |