Brooklyn based Commercial Artist Ricardo Villavicencio has a new site up, not intended to show a library of techniques or styles but instead to achieve a point of view in between Graphic Design and Imagemaking. Ricardo has done plenty of impressive work for BrandNewSchool and is currently freelancing from N.Y
Great animation/illustration and sound design from another Buck — CypherAudio collaboration. Pretty damn cool use of Instagram data too: “For this year’s US Open Tennis tournament, IBM and Ogilvy & Mather invited Buck out to Arthur Ashe Stadium to create live video animations using data from the tournament, delivered via Instagram. Using live data meant designing and deploying a custom toolkit and workflow that could shift with the on-court action, delivering responsive data-based animations, rendered and uploaded in minutes.”
L.A based LAUNDRY!, home of PJ Richardson, has updated with a new website, reel and tons of new work. LAUNDRY! specializes primarily in motion/animation work but have also created an interesting side category called the hamper showing a lot of out pitches, print, experimental and general design nic nacs which are a fun, unique and honest approach to their process as creatives.
New York-based Blind Pig, sister company to Absolute Post, collaborated with creative agency Hugo & Marie creating Coldplay’s latest music video Atlas, part of The Hunger Games: Catching Fire soundtrack. The video received close to another million views over the weekend, bringing it up to 4.6 million as of today. The amazing, fantastical illustrations, largely based around the celestial sky map and myth by Micah Lidberg, were brought to life by the Blind Pig team over the course of a couple of weeks. Working very closely with director Mario Hugo and Hugo & Marie’s creative team, the Blind Pig crew created a seamless and inspiring animation sequence that held true to the original, artful illustrations.
A fresh, creative, graphic take on tattoo art from Loïc aka Xoïl, working at Needles Side TattOo in France. Makes me want ink.
Following up on Johnny Kelly’s insanely successful “Back to the Start” stop-action film for Chipotle is not an easy task. The project mopped up at award shows and was a crowd favorite. Its analogue technique meaningfully echoed Chipotle’s message of bucking factory farming and technologically-powered “progress” for a more hands-on approach to food.
Louisiana-based Moonbot Studios, who won an Academy Award for the short, “The Fantastic Flying Books of Morris Lessmore” and set the gold standard for interactive storybooks with the accompanying Morris Lessmore iPad app, was up for the challenge.
Their recently released “The Scarecrow” echoes many of the same themes as “Back to the Start,” and its soundtrack also features a cover of a famous song performed by an unexpected artist. While “Back to the Start” had Willie Nelson singing Coldplay, in “The Scarecrow” Fiona Apple sings “Pure Imagination” from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. The effect is equal parts haunting and magical.
It’s also worth noting that Moonbot’s film is entirely CG. A helpful reader added some detail in the comments:
“Moonbot’s film is entirely CG” isn’t entirely accurate, the barn and the kitchen interior were built as miniatures, filmed, and composited into the CG scenes.
Where “Back to the Start” shined a bright light on the hand-crafted nature of its production, “The Scarecrow” dives deeper into its protagonist’s life. While both films are emotionally powerful, “The Scarecrow” feels more like a mini-feature film, executed with the same scale and grandeur as a Pixar film.
Keeping with the Morris Lessmore formula, Moonbot Studios also created an iOS game to accompany “The Scarecrow.” From Moonbot:
Created in collaboration with Chipotle Mexican Grill, “The Scarecrow” is an arcade-style adventure game for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch and a companion animated short film. Both pieces depict a scarecrow’s journey to bring wholesome food back to the people by providing an alternative to the processed food that dominates his world.
Award-winning design and digital production company Thornberg & Forester (T&F) has created a brilliant opening title sequence entitled “FRANCO” for The Comedy Central Roast of James Franco. The Roast had its broadcast premiere on Labor Day and it will be rebroadcast many times on the network. Working directly with Comedy Central VP of design Chris Scarlata and Tenth Planet producer, Rick Austin, T&F principals Scott Matz and Justin Meredith were both heavily involved in the project, along with senior art director and designer Kyle Miller and lead animator Ken Krueger.
“One of the best aspects of this project from beginning to end was the freedom to ‘find’ the story as we built out our storyboards,” said Miller. “Our style frames left a lot of open spaces which had to be filled, so we wrote out a script expanding our original kernel of Franco’s multi-level involvement in the making of this film.” … said Matz, “each scene was animated as a united RGB pass that was run through a master After Effects stack to automatically generate the appropriate colors from our chosen palette. Filmic textures and an animated ‘defocus’ treatment was applied the same way. Our ultimate goal was to mindfully and humorously celebrate the many facets of James Franco by showing them through an artfully classic and elegant lens.”
Outstanding piece by Tokyo-based Masanobu Hiraoka, one of the creatives from Je Regarde.
Recently jumped back into the freelance game so I launched a redesigned website and updated show-reel at digitalblackbook.com. Take a look around and let me know what you think – @amador_v
Two amazing game trailers in one day: Check out this 3:15 trailer for Ubisoft’s The Crew. Incredible CG and post-production by Unit Image. If you like cars, car games or appreciate CG this is for you. Unit Image also put up a great making-of:
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A. during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
