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
We’re very pleased to get this first batch of Happy F5 – RE:PLAY films online. We’ll be sharing three films at a time, one batch each Wednesday. Consider it F5 Wednesdays from here on out.
This first group includes work from Daniels, Kristoffer Borgli and Nomint. Each artist/studio has provided us a peek into the creative process for the work.
Our sincere thanks to all the artists behind RE:PLAY. Commissioned by F5, each team created unique and inspiring nuggets of creative expression. Perfect compliments to all of the other pearls that made up Happy F5 this year.
“RE:PLAY is a wonderful chance to be creative with no boundaries. When given total freedom as a storyteller, we (daniel&daniel) found ourselves battling between a desire to make something meaningful and honest and a desire to make something perverted (which is also in our case honest). Entirely by accident, Puppets became a perfect analogy for our self aware creative process. But mostly it’s lots of butt jokes.”
“There was so little time for the creative process, so the first thing I did was to limit myself. The theme was “happy”, so initially I wanted to do something outside in the sun, but at the time in Oslo there was still snow. Being fed up with snow after a long winter, there was no inspiration to be found outside. But I had seen this Villa drawn by Arne Korsmo, and wanting to film there for a long time. Also I had just watched the documentary “L’enfer d’Henri-Georges Clouzot”, which led me to buying a Slinky toy. So I limited myself to write something about a Slinky-toy inside this Villa. The main theme is about a resourcefull young woman, not being able to have fun, even though she has all these material posessions. It’s not untill she is in an extreme situation where she can connect with her feelings. Slinky made the day after all. Thank you DP Jon Gaute Espevold, my friends the actors, the Norwegian Foundation for Design and Architecture and the post production team at Storyline Studios!”
“When we where asked to make a video about happiness, we decided that we should take it from the very beginning, when it first appeared in the world.
We find happiness to be a very serious matter, definitely worthy of an awesome deity like Mahahula, an ancient gigantic infant rodent born from an alien space traveling seed that crash-landed on primordial earth. We wanted to depict happiness in all its glorious complexity: obscure, hard to find, huge and colorful. Is it more of a constant personal pursuit or is it a fortunate offering by others?
Mahahula came about with the sole purpose of spreading joy to the world, only there was no one around to hear her say so, as this was a long-long time ago. As we speak, she might or might not still be around warming our hearts for eternity.”
Watching Apache is like riding a merry-go-round of revolving visuals. With each part building upon itself in steady rotations, the piece reads like a narrative. Directed by illustrator Ned Wenlock, alongside character animator Rodney Selby, Apache is a Wild West inspired music-video for indie rock band, Danger Beach. Through a looping tale of time and travel, the characters assume several modes of transportation, only to be defeated by the modern metropolis.
Read our exclusive Q&A with Apache director, Ned Wenlock, here.
Let’s just address F5 from the heart. It’s been a little over a week and we still can’t get it out of our heads. Ping-pong between the speaker sessions, re:play films, installations, drinks, the massive balloon logo, and above all…the atmosphere.
From Friday morning forward, you brought warmth and curiosity to Roseland. You engaged with each other and the world-at-large. You helped build a village of inspiration that will live far into the future.
Judging from what’s been said, what’s been written, what’s been posted…you also walked away with something new. It could have been an appreciation for artists you just discovered – or those you already knew. You might now be working on a project through a different lens with some new friends. You may have lifted one of the pinatas and have it there, staring at you while you read this. There are so many possibilities and opportunities that came from the festival.
And you got the spirit of F5 from Day One. The minute that Buck’s titles rolled, it was clear that this was like no other conference before. We had puppets, peacocks and robots — DJ’s, VJ’s and MC’s — severed goat heads and happy face avatars — banjos and turntables — a laser harp — and countless perspectives on the creative process.
As Kid Koala finished his set with Moon River, the beauty of our collective spirit was fully awake and you all stood as one – until the balloons fell late on Saturday. The dreamers and the doers came out. And your smiles said it all. Thank you from the bottom of hearts.
(Our countless thanks to Buck and music/sound design team, Antfood, for an incredible title sequence that brought down the house and set a new benchmark for the future of titles. Basil and Noodles are the new mascots of F5! Check out the full version — and photos from the event)
Time to karate chop the clock! Loving the little touches like iguana tail and chicken claw fondue in Johnny Kelly‘s new spot for Bacardi. (via @brangrow)
With the lead-up to F5 taking up so much of our time at Motionographer, we were admittedly led astray and almost (keyword: almost) let a piece of stellar quality slip between the cracks. But as they say, better late than never.
Last month, Psyop released a piece unique to its typically CG pipeline and something that —on YouTube alone— has already garnered over 5 million views. In Plain, for Greek dairy company, Fage, Psyop was forced to rethink it’s pipeline when they discovered they would only be allotted two short weeks of post-production time. By approaching most of the shots in-camera and integrating CG only when absolutely necessary, the team of artists rose to the challenge and created a piece that is not only hauntingly beautiful, but a testament to their ingenuity.
In an exclusive Q&A with additional behind-the-scenes artwork, we caught up with Psyop to find out exactly how they did it. Check it out here.
