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
Here’s an abstract stop-motion to contrast with your digital days. Max Hattler directs this analogue futurist music video for Jemapur’s AANAATT. (Thanks, Jason!)
Here’s an abstract stop-motion to contrast with your digital days. Max Hattler directs this analogue futurist music video for Jemapur’s AANAATT. (Thanks, Jason!)
Between Bears, created by Eran Hilleli at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, is a film beyond its years as a student piece and occupies a distinctive place in the spectrum of contemporary, short subject animation.
Unto itself, nearly every frame is a moving illustration. The style of the piece reduces forms to a graphical simplicity, making the visual language of the film both graceful and crude. As your eyes waft over a succession of thoughtfully composed landscapes, negative space helps to establish a vivid sense of solitary amongst the characters—sequestered, but coming to terms with a world in surrounding desolation.
Together, through a muted palette of analogous colors, the graphical beauty of the film—for some—may pull ahead of the equally abstract, yet solemn narrative, but comparatively, while the literal message of the piece may be open for interpretation, the bleak transgression of visuals paint a stark reality.
Top Blacklist director, Pistachios, has partnered with with co-director Aaron Kisner and the Vital Voices Global Partnership to bring us The Story of Kakenya. The piece chronicles the real-life and inspiring story of Kakenya Ntaiya: a young girl who —throughout her childhood— escaped dogmatic African traditions toward women by pursuing a higher education and fulfilling her dream of becoming a teacher.
The style does not deviate too far the signature Pistachios aesthetic. The look is abstract, graphic, and sparse, which recalls the emblematic patterns and geometric taste of African design that has become globally acknowledged.
Barcelona-based Dvein gets eccentric with six beautiful ident-like spots for the experimental cinema’s exhibition, Xcentric. The exhibition will feature 50 years of Spanish, independent cinema as well as travel to different locations in the US. Commissioned through their reps, 8 de agosto, Dvein directed and produced the spots with their usual technical finesse. The 3D blends perfectly with some live-action elements to end in an abstract poem.
Motionographer reader Chino tipped us off to “Tower Bawher”, a stirring salute to Russian Constructivism by Théodore Ushev from way back in 2006. The visuals are brilliantly synced to the locomotive music, building an abstract mechano-utopian vision of civilization that’s full of energy but poignantly lacking warmth.
For more excellent work of this caliber, browse the impressive NFB archives.
Over the last year or so, we’ve seen a lot projects involving the projection of video onto architectural structures. The most interesting of these are films that actually take the contours of the building into account, creating perceptual tricks of scale and encouraging viewers to think of the buildings as malleable structures.
To get the full effect, it helps to think about the experience of being a visitor to one of these structures—rather than simply viewing them as web video. Go full-screen, if you can.
555 KUBIK
Ubranscreen teamed up with art director Daniel Rossa to create whimsical deconstructions of the Hamburg Kunsthalle.
Tetragram for Enlargment
Collective Apparati Effimeri took a minimal approach to their projection on the Malatesta Castle Verucchio.
EasyWeb Building Projection Reel
French studio EasyWeb shows off three years of their playful interaction with architectural forms.
Mint Plaza
Obscura Digital was commissioned by McAfee to liven up Mint Plaza in downtown San Fransisco.
Phyletic Museum
Robert Seidel applies his unique approach to abstract CG imagery to the Phyletic Museum in Germany.
Puma “Lift”
Dreamed up by agency Droga5 for Puma, “Lift” turns the model inside-out, creating a dynamic performance space.
Quadrature
More minimal animation in this a/v performance by Alican Aktürk and Refik Anadol, a.k.a. Griduo.
In an attempt to brand itself as the source for a wide range of cultural and educational programming, Australia’s SBS hired Mighty Nice to push the envelope a bit. The most recent fruits of these labors are a series of slapstick IDs that originally aired during Ashes 2009, a long-standing, wildly popular cricket series between England and Australia.
Slapstick is hard enough to pull off in live action, but to manage it with composited animation is a feat worth applauding. The comedic timing between the actor and his unseen props is perfectly in line with the cartoonish spirit of these spots—a cartoonishness brilliantly offset by the elegant end tags.
For a much more abstract take, Mighty Nice also created a set of idents that interpret SBS as shifting tableaux of form and color inspired by the sounds of SBS.
Although created for the same client, the visual and conceptual distance of these idents from the Ashes spots is a testament to Mighty Nice’s flexibility as a studio.
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.
