It’s Friday. Your aching brain machinery needs a little lubrication, some sonic petroleum to rejuvenate your synapses.
We’ve got just the thing. Lovingly mixed for Motionographer by Expansion Team’s Alex Moulton, “Time Traveler” is a feel-good journey through sine waves, black holes and the fourth dimension.
This is our first ever guest DJ mix. If you like it, let us know. Maybe there’s more where this came from…
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Psyop is quick on the draw with “West,” the studio’s latest cowboy epic in their cardboard-inspired campaign for The UPS Store and agency Doner.
“West” is peppered with the lore of the old frontier, and opens fire on any charge that “certified packing” is all hat, and no cattle. Barnstorming the airwaves with a rough ridin’ emphasis on theatrical swank and rip-roaring thrills, Psyop packs heat, and hangs em’ so high it would make Clint Eastwood blush.
Stay tuned for some exclusive behind-the-scenes action for the forthcoming final spot in the UPS campaign. In the meantime, check out the other two releases:
I’m very pleased to announce that two news films have been added to the Challenge Your World 20/20 project.
What’s Challenge Your World 20/20?
Each year, 20 video artists create 20 wild, whimsical, and unconventional machines that solve environmental issues. These videos reject the status quo, explore crazy ideas, and blast beyond boundaries.
The latest two additions, “Potato” and “Want|Need” come to us from Paris’ Moustache and Trango Interactive in Pakistan. Check them out on the Challenge Your World page or visit the Challenge Your World website for more information and to learn how you can get involved.
In the words of Capacity’s Ellerey Gave, “Before we became designers and animators and communicators, we were painters and illustrators and dreamers.”
Over the course of the last year and a half, Culver City-based Capacity has been working on an in-house short film while juggling client projects for companies like NBC, Cartoon Network and Toyota.
At long last, “Upgrade + Mobilize” is ready for the masses, and it’s definitely worth the wait. Mixing inspiration from Asian animation and art with their own polished aesthetic, Capacity has created a high energy, two and a half minute preamble to an epic battle of good vs. evil backed by beautiful audio from Plaid.
Motionographer was fortunate to get an advance interview with Ellerey about “Upgrade + Mobilize.” Check it out, along with some process work showing the development of this ambitious short film.
Peppermill Berlin recently created a fine visual essay for German rail company Deutsche Bahn. We’d normally Quickie this sort of thing, but the video comes with a special promise attached to it:
For every view of the above video, Deutsche Bahn will donate 10 cents to the “Bergwald Project,” which has worked over 20 years for the protection and preservation of forest ecosystems in central Europe.
For more on Deutsche Bahn’s green efforts, go here.
Typographic animation, it’s everywhere. You now get a free typographic animation with a box of breakfast cereal, and word has it that there’s an iPhone app for turning your shopping list into a twirling maelstrom of typographic glee. Apparently, Gary Busey is planning to turn himself into a typographic animation for an installation piece at The Whitney…
Anyhow, the point is that here at Motionographer Glades we kind of now feel that a typo animation now has to be pretty special to make the cut—which is definitely the case with this new cinema spot from Mighty Nice for The Melbourne Writers Festival.
Says Mighty Nice’s Darren Price:, “JWT Melbourne came to us with a straight brief: to animate type as it gets read by a voice over. Each genre of writing would see a change in the style of typography.”
And so it does. Type styles were meticulously mapped out by Mighty Nice’s art director, Softly Dunstan, who then contracted swine flu and dropped out of the picture, leaving the boys in charge.
“By the time the art director returned to the task,” says Price, “there were little girls turning into skeletons, spaceships and zombie hands added to the mix.”
What really surprised me is that all the voice over tracks were recorded by the authors themselves. The horror author sounds creepy, romance writer sounds sexy and the sci-fi author makes a great android… amazing.
So says Chris Harding, one of London-based Shynola’s four founders, in our interview with him about their recent music video for Coldplay’s “Strawberry Swing.”
Despite the disclaimer, Shynola’s body of work—especially their music videos—have inspired thousands of fans worldwide with their innovative visuals and compelling narratives. Motionographer’s Lilian Darmono and James Wignall went deep with Chris about the process behind “Strawberry Swing” and touched on Shynola’s development over the years.
Charming character designs, a lush rendering style and unabashedly adorable visual effects make “Flavorhood” unique. Directors Jonathan Garin and Naomi Nishimura’s acute attention to color and tiny aniamated details add great personality to the work.
We caught up with Jonathan for some information about the project:
Flavorhood was definitely a beast in many aspects, from both the practical and digital sides. We went through extensive planning and prepping before we started building anything, using our original previs as a guide for real world measurements and frame counts from scene to scene. So in the end, the final picture is very close to what we originally set out to do.
It’s definitely the largest set we’ve ever built, about 16×20ft, created in sections, with little pop out holes so people could reach different areas during the shoot. Most things in the spot are constantly changing or transforming which meant shooting multiples of passes, making for a very intricate shoot and compositing puzzle. And when you throw in everything thats coming out of 3D, it definitely kept everyone busy.
Check out the behind the scenes action for “Flavorhood.” Its just as fun as watching the final spot!
To quote the introductory video above, The New Mediators builds diagrams using a “design language that can be assembled quickly, almost in real-time, and universal enough to be adapted.”
What Jarvis is proposing goes beyond motion graphics into the fields of journalism, education and activism (though he doesn’t seem to actively acknowledge that last one). Unlike visual essays, which use metaphor to suggest multiple layers of meaning at once, Jarvis is interested instead in simplifying and demystifying our complex world.
This is the general aim of information graphics and in itself is nothing new, but Jarvis’ real-time twist points to an exciting array of possibilities that are only now being tapped. Before I go on, take a moment to watch Jarvis deconstructing Obama’s stimulus package before a live audience:
Flying V, a new collaboration between 2008 Supinfocom alumni Clément Soulmagnon & Gary Levesque, has created a short film titled Virgile. Following a shy guy named Virgile who desperately tries to impress a gal by being everything other than himself, Clément and Gary display their prowess for everything a successful short film needs. From original concept to final composite this film would make Supinfocom proud, especially considering that they are only one year out from creating the extremely successful short films “Gary” and “Yankee Gal“.
Apart from being impressed by these french youngsters kicking ass and taking numbers, I’m also intrigued by the fact that this film was entirely produced at Wizz Design. During a year in which financial survival has the edge over creativity, it is uplifting to see a company put their own dime into a short film. When all the competition is churning out “money jobs” a few solid investments in creative can jockey companies into better positioning when all the economic turmoil is over.
In “Drifters,” for Travelers Insurance, a flock of red umbrellas come together to protect life’s most valued assets, in this spot from vfx boutique a52, and agency Fallon and Gorgeous Enterprises.
