Method: SFIFF

As part of a new identity system for the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF), the branding gurus at Method (not to be confused with vfx house Method Studios) whipped up a nice trailer.

sfiff.jpg

No, there’s nothing earth-shattering going on here. No wicked cool effects. No groundbreaking innovations.

But it works. It captures the artsy vibe of SFIFF without going sterile. The contrast of colored human forms effervescing against understated black-and-white backdrops blends nicely with the bubbly soundtrack to create a playful tension.

It also fits perfectly within the rest of the branding effort. Check out the ultra-clean SFIFF web presence to get a feel for the whole system.

About the author

Justin Cone

/ justincone.com
Together with Carlos El Asmar, Justin co-founded Motionographer, F5 and The Motion Awards. He currently lives in Austin, Texas with is wife, son and fluffball of a dog. Before taking on Motionographer full-time, Justin worked in various capacities at Psyop, NBC-Universal, Apple, Adobe and SCAD.

6 Comments

jay

that’s so hip! anyone know how they did the random dots/ LED effects?

David Lewandowski

I don’t like the design and the animation is sort of a turn off. Maybe motion blur would have helped- or hurt this animation more since everything feels so “hindged” and stop go…

apple shift k. apple shift k. say it with me. apple shift k. 0, tab, 100. Please. For the children.

Jay : Look like they got an expression to grab time values from another comp with the dots animating in it, depending on how bright/dark their lum values were. Then probably used autotrace or something to do the really larger ones around the edge bits.

mr.doob

crap! I did exactly the same effect the last week here:
https://mrdoob.com/code/doobscii/

Onur Aksoy

I’m so certain there’s a plugin that does exactly this – I remember experiementing with it a few months back. You can select your own custom shape/image.

The first character seems to work on greater levels than the rest – it’s the only one that interacts with the environment.

As for the moon rising – looks great :)

Green/Blue + black contract works nicely.

I think to really stand out yeah: interaction.
Eg. climbing onto buildings, walking on bridge.
What do you guys think?

Jon

I love funkstorung, but that has to be the most overused audio track in motion graphics today.

I’m not completely sold on the spot, but it accomplishes what it needs to in a fairly workman like way. Probably could have benefited from a cut down in duration though.

Method

Jay:

The dot effect was actually created using processing. Processing would then analyze the lightness and darkness of the rotoscoped footage and spit out EPS files frame by frame, these file were then imported as an image sequence in AE.

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