Hasta La Motion!

It has been a great year so far for title sequences, add another to 2013: Directed by Irmak Arkman, Main Titles for GRID, Digital Culture and Moving Images Festival.

Istanbul has become an exciting new destination for art and design of late; this new festival aims to celebrate that development with a fitting new format that helps facilitate networking and collaborations. Hopefully, the festival will earn itself a good place in the usual circuit of European design festivals helping further integrate Istanbul with the European design scene and providing easy access for creative professionals from Balkans, Middle East and beyond.

GRID will create an important platform for training and networking providing designers, artists, advertising and cinema professionals of Turkey the chance to get together and benefit from the experiences of the best names over a broad spectrum of design –ranging from web design to typography, illustration to post-production, interaction and experience design to social media campaigns. Meanwhile, it will provide international ad and design community the chance to get to know better the much-coveted Istanbul scene and make valuable contacts there.

The festival will have two editions every year –one in spring and the other in fall. The line-up for the second edition will take place in next fall.

gridthefestival.com

Main Titles Credits:

Direction & Design: Ouchhh
Director: Ferdi Alici
3d Artists and Designers: Bahadir Dagdelen, Caglar Ozen,
Ferdi Alici, Emre Onol, Yusuf Emre Kucur, H. Kerem Kose,
Roto Artists: Selay Karasu, Ozgur Alici
VFX Technical Director: Caglar Ozen
Typography: Eylul Duranagac
Sound Design: Selcuk Can Guven, Ferdi Alici
Project Manager: Dilan Regal
Video Production Director: Dilek Altan
Models: Meltem Bakan, Robbie-Lee Valentine
Hair: Fikret Tanr?verdi
Make-Up: Meltem Açmazzambak
Clothes by Nu

ouchhh.tv

Festival organization: Kurye Video and Grid ?stanbul

Mixtape club created this simple, creative and effective video for the new Google’s project called “Project Loon“, The idea is to have hundreds or more of high-pressure balloons floating around our planet providing Internet for all.

London-based Tom Wrigglesworth and Matt Robinson, aka Wriggles & Robins, create this lovely in-camera music video for Travis’s Moving. On a chilly chilly set, the band’s breath reveals animations within a projector beams.

My favorite part? The simple staircase where it’s hard to tell if the dimensionality is in the animation or an ode to Anthony McCall‘s volumetric light.

The video is based on a concept explored in Wriggles & Robins’ short film, Love is in the Air. There’s nothing quite like real light interacting with fluid dynamics to remind you the real world is magic.

Credits
Directed by Wriggles & Robins
Production company: RSA
Projected Animation: MPC
EP: Tracy Stokes, Richard Flintham, Casper Delaney
Producer: Noreen Khan
Online Producer: Alannah Currie
DP: Luke Palmer
Editor: Ben Campbell at Cut and Run
Lead Animator: Bernat Amengual
Sound Mix: Phil Bolland at 750mph
Special thanks to MPC, Panovision, The Khans & Shepperton studios

Posted on Motionographer

As our industry changes, it’s important to keep an eye on how trends in the wider world can affect us. While Motionographer does not specifically endorse companies or products, we do like to occasionally share interesting developments.

Our creative world is becoming more international than ever. Where entire jobs used to be done at huge studios, small teams around the world now collaborate.

But when it comes to getting everyone paid, the global financial system hasn’t kept up. International money transfers are expensive, slow, and generally a hassle for everyone involved.

There may be a solution on the horizon. Digital currencies like Bitcoin, LiteCoin, and Ripple are completely re-imagining the idea of money – and they have the potential to make it easier to settle up anywhere in the world.

Today, to pay an artist internationally, a studio either needs to send an international wire transfer – which is expensive, slow, and often requires a trip to the bank, or use a service like PayPal – which usually charges a high fee (3-4%) to the artist getting paid. And in some countries like Argentina, currency controls make it almost impossible for an artist to receive money from overseas without having a foreign bank account.

Soon, the process may get  easier – and cheaper. Studios will be able to go online and use a small app or encrypted website to transfer digital currency anywhere in the world with almost no transfer fees – far less than 1%. And the process will only take minutes.

Digital currency has several important potential advantages over the current systems. Transfers are fast, inexpensive, and incorporate strong cryptography that makes them anonymous. Digital currency is also immune to the capital controls that plague many developing countries.

It’s important to keep in mind that this is a work in progress, rather than an alternative that is ready today.

Converting from digital currency into “old” money – dollars, euros, pesos, etc – is still harder than it should be. The exchange rates between digital currencies and real currencies can still go through big swings, and digital currency is similar to cash – if you lose the file, or forget your cryptographic key, it’s gone. There’s no bank to call for customer service.

Today, digital currency is no longer purely experimental – but not quite mainstream. It represents a cool attempt to bring the ideas of open architectures, distributed networks, and cryptography to money. In the larger perspective, it represents a shift away from global dominance by governments and banking conglomerates to a distributed financial system.

Digital currency could one day become a faster, cheaper, and more secure way to get paid for international work. It’s something every artist should keep an eye on.

To learn more, check out these links:

1. Bitcoin
2. LiteCoin
3. Ripple

Posted on Motionographer

The latest work from Psyop for Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Honey: Swarm. Together with Arnold Worldwide and Smuggler, Psyop developed a spot that features an unstoppable force of CG bees on the hunt for a bottle of Tennessee Honey.

“Shooting on the Warner Bros backlot allowed us a lot of control over the shots,” commented Psyop Creative Director, Laurent Ledru. “Working with Arnold and Smuggler made for a smooth production, and we were able to get what we needed in camera with the expert eye of Director of Photography, Robert Elswitt.”

The new spot was first pre-released via Twitter/Facebook and garnered more than 10 million impressions before ever hitting the TV waves.

“’Swarm’ is an evolution of the original King Bee launch spot, we wanted the new spot to demonstrate the many fans that Tennessee Honey has acquired throughout the year,” said Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Honey Senior Brand Manager Casey Nelson. “King Bee is back with his swarm – his followers.”

“Swarm” has aired on NBA and NHL playoff games, late night TV, sports and lifestyle programming. Jack Honey and the “Swarm” TV spot will be back on air three more times this fiscal year in support of the other Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Honey program periods.
*Nielsen: Total US FDL, 52 weeks ending 5.27.13