This week’s RE:PLAY films come from Alexander Gellner and David Wilson. Fellas, take it away…
ALEXANDER GELLNER – “HOW TO GET IDEAS”
“I was thinking a lot about concepts of creativity and the exploitation of ideas. On the one hand, you can’t really steal ideas, only share them. To make a solution public and enable collaboration, raises the potential of one small idea and things can build on each other. The whole CreativeCommons movement is based on this concept. But in a competitive, entrepreneur driven environment, sharing may not be perceived as the ideal and the value increases by being the sole vendor of one idea/solution. The famous “I drink your milkshake” scene in “There will be blood” finally gave me a visual shorthand for this paradox. I used collage technique instead of my usual lineart, because collage art is unapologetic about appropriating and building on work that other people have made for you. ”
DAVID WILSON – “LIFE AS AN INDEPENDENT ASTRONAUT”
“I didn’t want to start with a blank piece of paper on this one. In fact, I decided to step away from my desk completely and start with some fabric, card, scissors and glue, and I made this space suit. The process of doing and making is very therapeutic for me. Over the few days that it took me to create the suit, I developed the character of who lived inside it. Developing the script and costume side-by-side made a lot of sense to me, and was refreshing to start from a different angle. Ultimately, the life of John Barlow, our Independent Astronaut revolves around the importance of inner peace and finding acceptance.”
Motionographer recently posted 3 Dreams of Black, the Chris Milk music video intended for exclusive viewing on a browser. When it’s running, the animation progresses so fluidly that you forget it’s built entirely in WebGL and rendering on the fly. It’s in the computer… or, perhaps more accurately, in your graphics card (which doesn’t sound quite as dramatic).
I had the chance to speak with some of the folks over at Mirada about the process of making 3 Dreams of Black, interactivity’s increasing influence in the motion design field, and the future of Mirada. Check out the interview and some lovely production art here.
Game of Thrones premiered on HBO last month to join a line-up of already stellar shows. What caught our eye was the intricate titles that opened the show up. We had a chance to interview the director behind the titles, Angus Wall of Elastic, who shed some insight on the project.
I still remember the first time I saw Bradley (GMUNK) Munkowitz’s experimental short, “Finn.” It was in 2002, and I was working as a web designer for the University of Texas, crammed into a dim corner of a room with brown carpeted walls and humming fluorescent lights.
Seeing that film was an important moment in my career. Along with a handful of other groundbreaking works, it sparked an interest in motion design that has sustained me to the current day.
Now, with the (long overdue) relaunch of Gmunk’s site, “Finn” is online, along with 10 years worth of other work. There’s also some great new Tron making-of action in the mix. It’s simultaneously a trip down memory lane and a look into the future.
I should also mention that David Lewandowski mounted a relaunch, too (Quickied). More Tron goodness there, as well as a bucketful of inspiring work.
Another week, another great batch. We have RE:PLAY films from James Copeman & Sam Renwick and Peppermelon with music/sound design from David Kamp. Two wildly different approaches to happiness, but both focusing on singular protagonists who yearn for the understanding of the world around them.
JAMES COPEMAN – “THE TELL TAIL”
“The brief was really open, all it said was “happiness”. It got me thinking about an interview I’d read with actor Christopher Walken a few weeks earlier. In it, he had mentioned his desire to have a tail. ‘It would be so great to have a tail. It would be like.. Look, get back, don’t fuck with Chris today, look at his tail, he looks pissed.’
This got me thinking, I thought how it would be to have a tail that expressed your basic emotions that were subconscious and you couldn’t control it. I pitched this idea to my good friend Sam Renwick, we then sat down and started writing funny scenarios and problems caused by having a tail.The protagonist would struggle with it, and ultimately find happiness in hacking the tail off with some DIY cosmetic surgery. I knew Sam could play the lead character. It was great to get Ed Rutherford on board to shoot it and Caroline Story was really excited about making some prosthetic dog tails. I was concerned about getting the narrative across in under 2mins but somehow it works, and people seem to get it. Sam and I are now working on our next short.”
PEPPERMELON – “fIRST”
FROM PEPPERMELON: “This is PepperMelon’s first approach to classic storytelling, but with the ol’ characteristic pink colors, tweaks and quirks of Garcia’s style…Happiness is to inspire and be inspired; it is the result of connecting with someone else. fIRST represents happiness as something that needs to be shared with someone to actually lift our hearts. True creations, true happiness cannot be achieved while being alone; it is something shared in a crowd, or in twos. Happiness is not about smiling, but about connecting. And, there’s always a first time for all of us to experience this. This is the story…of a fIRST.”
FROM DAVID KAMP: “The piece was a lot of fun to work on, especially since its quite different from my usual musical endeavours. I collaborated with a friend back from my university days. He is a trained Cellist and played the Cello parts on the piece, which i think really brought it to life. I feel like the cello really helps to connect you to the main character and his feelings. An inspiration in that regard was the Cello Theme in Wong Kar-Wai’s great Film “In the mood for Love”. Its been a while that i saw the film, but the melancholic feeling i remembered from that movie was what i wanted to express in my score. The project was a great challenge in the limited amount of time and in between other jobs, but i think the result is a nice little short.”
David Prosser‘s short film, Matter Fisher, makes it’s online debut this week as the winner of Short of the Week‘s Great Film Competition. It’s a lovely mix of high-contrast frame animation and cg, in which a lone fisherman encounters an initially unassuming, hungry ball of matter.
Buck teams up with Google again to playfully and accessibly convey a game-changing idea… your future computer won’t be a computer… it will be a window onto your identity and content that lives on a data cloud. Music by Antfood perfectly drives the visuals and adds personality to the Chromebook via pizzicato strings.
Personally, I’m excited that Milk and Koblin are emphasizing how the open-source nature of these tools can help grow a community that will create even more experiments in the future. On the tech end, it does require Google Chrome and not all graphics cards are supported, including the desktop I first tried this out on :(. There’s still a lot of goodies and documentation on the website, so go explore.
HTML5 “experiences” seem to be popping up more and more, for example the new desktop version of Smith & Foulkes’ The Chase. As we move forward, will learning how to work with dynamic systems, rather than locked thirty or sixty second films become a necessary part of our workflow? Also- what does it say about us when the first thing someone does, after finding out that they can contribute to a landscape, is create a 1-up mushroom?
This week, we have RE:PLAY films from Holbrooks, Physalia and Mixtape Club. Another great line-up of talented directors approaching the idea of happiness, joy and synchronicity in clever ways. We’ll let the artists speak for themselves…
MIXTAPE CLUB – “HELLO I LIKE YOU”
‘”When presented with the creative brief, we thought what better way to express our happiness than to distill the essence of our craft, to serve up a creamy shot of artistic espresso? So with this film, we’ve gone back to the basics: the simplest of inanimate objects, and transformed them into a tapestry of playful, choreographed dance for your enjoyment.
The goal here was simply to explore materials, themes, and techniques that have always made us happy – the things that drew us to this crazy art form in the first place. Like music. The whole process started with some simple visual experiments, and using those initial kernels as a starting point, we worked back and forth with our favorite tuneful youngsters, Huma-Huma, to develop the score for this piece. The music and the visuals evolved organically together, with each new version inspiring something in the other. We always find it particularly satisfying to develop the sound as part of the process itself.”
PHYSALIA – “INDUCTANCE”
“Inductance is the making-of for a piece that will never exist, a behind the scenes with no scenes! When faced with the challenge of creating a short under the theme of happiness, we first concluded with Gerardo del Hierro that whether the short was going to overtly address the theme or not, what we really wanted was to enjoy the process. We have always loved to share the making-of’s for our pieces, not only because we usually have fun developing tools that allow us to create them (sometimes in a very masochistic sort of way!) but because we understand as professionals that part of the enjoyment of watching a piece comes from finding out how the hell it was done.
The choice of the device to build came shortly after, spurred by some painful trial-error process and being the colour balls from the F5 logo the last inspiration spark we needed. The video is a document of how the happiest machine Physalia has built to date came to exist.”
HOLBROOKS – “VELO CEREBRUM”
“We wanted to take a dry look at the subject of happiness. To strip down the aesthetics of a smile, literally tearing skin from flesh, flesh from bone, bone cracking away. We wanted to expose the brain and let it reveal the spirituality and enigma of happiness. Of a simple action that makes this person happy in a way that they’d find hard to describe.”
The Node is an experimental piece of film and sound design. With a sound-bed by Philip Glass, the audio was re-designed by a handful of the some of the most well know and talented sound designers of late (see below). The piece has a starkness reminiscent of Alex Roman’s The Third & The Seventh which is pushed further than nice images and a clean architectural feel. It possesses a certain ominous silence.
“The Node” should be considered as a virtual installation including a collection of recurrences. Each audial redesign of “The Node” will be made by pure minds. A notification will be made when each version goes online. – Murat Pak
Carlos Lascano directs this epic piece to celebrate 50 years of Amnesty International. Music by Hans Zimmer and Lorne Balfe, animation by Eallin. Check out the making-of.
Put Tuesday 7th June into your diary! See No Evil presents an evening with Nexus Productions head honcho,Chris O’Reilly. Music from Hear No Evil and prizes to be won!
