Supinfocom :: OCEANSIZE

This massive 8-minute offering from four Supinfocom Arles students may be the most ambitious student piece I have ever seen—and it’s my favorite to date.

Amazing attention to detail, exquisite lighting, and epic matte paintings are just the beginning of this oil rigging adventure gone wrong.  The suspense follows 2 futuristic oil riggers, one barring a remarkably close resemblance to Romain Jouandeau himself, as they square off against what they are looking for in the first place. Unfortunately for their sake, it finds them.

Created in 10 months by Romain Jouandeau, Adrien Chartie, Gilles Mazières and Fabien Thareau, this project has some truly beautiful moments.  It also boasts a very high level of skill in the technical department, with an awesome combined use of Realflow and the 3D Max plug-in, Dreamscape.

For a behind the scenes look at the making of Oceansize and other delectable goodies, be sure to look here at the official site.  For even more excellent sketches, concept art and matte painting work, have a look at Romain’s personal site.

These Days and Finger Industries are ‘Friends of Glass’

Dutch agency These Days along with Sheffield based animation house Finger Industries have produced this heart warming viral for Friends of Glass. The animation makes up part of a well conceived campaign to encourage the use of glass over plastics and so on, because of its ability to be recycled 100%.

Hank the bottle (Although he has had many previous incarnations) acts as spokes bottle, cheer bottle and vocalist (Sorry, couldn’t squeeze ‘bottle’ in there) for his own tune which spins the yarn of his own super resilient life story.

Creating a convincing and entertaining character to head up a campaign is no easy task and in clumsy hands this can result in a head-shaking cheese-fest. But thanks to some deft lyrics writing by Paul Van Oevelen at These days and sweet animation work by Finger Industries, the result is a character and viral that really ‘warms the cockles’.

Also, make sure to check out all the letters on the accompanying website addressed to various luminaries of the showbiz world. The agency really rinse out the schwarzenegger joke that makes up the backbone of the campaign, as well coming up with a few more gems. Trying to get ‘Plastic Bertrand’ to change his name to ‘Glass Bertrand’ certainly raised a smile in the Robson household…

Credits

MK12 and Marc Forster: Swiss International Air

Marc Forster and MK12 teamed up once again to create this meditative animation for Swiss International Air. I was able to chat with creative director and co-founder of MK12, Tim Fisher, and ask him a few questions:

From looking at this piece it seems like it was a pretty open brief. Could you describe the origins of the project?

Marc called up to the studio one day and asked if we wanted to collaborate on a short film with him that was being commissioned by SWISS.

Many of the key concepts came from Marc’s original writing for the project, which had a very personal and introspective tone to it. We started to work within a montage-based anti-aesthetic, which we felt was an appropriate metaphor for memory and thinking
processes.

It’s like a literal stream of consciousness. Or the visual equivalent of a lyric essay.

If I’m counting correctly, this is the 4th project that you have worked on with director Marc Forster. Being a company that is known for its collective mentality, how has it been working with an outside director?

Yeah, this is our fourth project with Marc. He’s really fantastic to work with. He’s got a brilliant mind and he’s really supportive of the people around him. He’s very family-oriented, in that he continues to work with the same group of folks on every film. They are an amazing and smart bunch.

We think we’ve created some of our best work with Marc and the gang- and we hope to continue to do so.

Something that I like about this animation is that one can see it’s roots in old MK12 work, yet it is a clear jump in the collective’s growth in production quality and aesthetic refinement. Do you find this to be true? What do you think is the next step for MK12?

We hope that every project reflects some level of growth from our studio. We’re pretty happy with this film and it’s creative production.

We keep on keeping on. We’ve got a couple of things coming up. We’ve got two in-house short film projects moving along at a glacial pace; both are somewhere in their own respective pre-production. We created some work for the The Beatles: Rock Band game that’ll be out in September. Otherwise, it’s summer road trips, BBQs, red beers and fun in the midwest heat.

Thank you, Tim, for taking the time to talk to us. I think I speak for a lot of people when saying that we can’t wait to see those future MK12 projects.

Credits

Tatia Rosenthal Interview (and Special Screening Opportunity)

I recently had a chance to chat with director Tatia Rosenthal about her debut stop-motion feature film, $9.99. Check out the trailer and read the interview for details on getting a free ticket to a special screening of the film co-hosted by Motionographer in Manhattan on June 16th. We’ve just run out of tickets. Looking forward to seeing some of you there!

$9.99 is set to open on June 19th. You can visit the official site for more details.

F5 RE:PLAY Film Festival: Batch Three

A little behind schedule on this one, as I’ve spent the last week packing and moving. This is the third batch of films created for the F5 RE:PLAY film festival. Our deepest gratitude goes to Ubik, Digital Kitchen, and Imaginary Forces for their participation.

Ubik “Voxel”

Digital Kitchen “Brass”

Imaginary Forces “The First Time”

Related posts:

• F5 RE:PLAY Film Festival: Batch One
• F5 RE:PLAY Film Festival: Batch Two
  
• F5 RE:PLAY FILM FESTIVAL

Civilization by Marco Brambilla (featuring Crush)

Imagine stepping into an elevator and looking through a viewport that reveals your ascension to heaven or—if you’re on your way to the street—your descent to hell (appropriately enough).

This interpretation of Dante’s Divine Comedy is precisely the experience video artist Marco Brambilla (director of Demolition Man) and Toronto-based studio Crush were striving for in Civilization, a video mural created for the new Standard hotel in New York City.

The entire mural uses over 400 video sources, including samples from several films—something Brambilla is well-known for in his work. This particular project came with some special technical challenges, though. Crush explains:

We began with exploring the idea of using a game engine to house the project. Seemed easy, map footage onto planes in space, attach a PC to the elevator and we can move up and down in the game environment all day. Unfortunately, once we started to collage the clips together in the Flame we knew the game engine idea wouldn’t fly.

We approximated that we would have 250 looped HD clips in the environment and our Flame could barely handle it (in the end it was closer to 500 looping clips). We compromised by locking ourselves into the idea that we would create a huge vertical canvas that we would scan up and down on once the elevator was in motion. The final piece was approximately 1920 x 7500 pixels.

Read on for a Q&A with Marco Brambillla and detailed notes from Crush’s Sean Cochrane about the technical challenges behind this project.

For commercial work, Marco Brambilla is represented in the US by The Ebeling Group.

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.