Michael Langan’s music video for Hundred Waters’ “Cavity” features the filmmaker’s trademark penchant for playing with multiplicity and repetition.
What begins as a deceptively simple pillar of light hovering over a nighttime desert evolves into a series of hypnotic visual echoes, as Langan sculpts forms with topographic light.
Entranced by the alien landscapes, I found myself oscillating between two states of mind: 1) wondering how the hell he pulled everything off, and 2) not caring at all.
From Langan:
We used a single flashlight drawn over the landscape hundreds of times to create the lighting effects for “Cavity.” The sliver of light on Nicole’s face involves a projector and a motorized lazy Susan, performed over multiple takes and then multiplied in post.
More from Langan
For more of Langan’s inventiveness, check out the films below.
In Dvein’s latest short, “We Wander,” you won’t find CG fluid sims or virtual Rube Goldbergs of visual oddities. Instead, you’ll find haunting visuals of animals carousing in the dusky liminal spaces between darkness and light, nature and civilization and hunted and hunter.
Each shot crackles with graphical clarity, despite being a live action production. The sound design, foley work and music add a hyperreal edge to every animal movement, creating a surreal, visceral undercurrent to the strange narrative that unfolds.
Directed by Dvein
Cinematography · Dani Robles
Editor · María Antón Cabot
Sound Editor · Eduardo Castro
Foley Artist · Alex F. Capilla
Music · Tomás Virgós
Head of production · Anahí Puig & Sergi Roda
Art Direction · Ana Muñiz
Production manager · Idoia Sánchez
Production assistant · Sara Valderas, Belinda Sánchez
Camera operator · Vivian Rodríguez
Animals · Fauna y Acción
Post-production · Alba Ribera, Lluisa Cuchillo
Producer · Marga Sardá
Type design · Superexpresso
Produced by Agosto & Dvein
Thanks to: Gabriel Azorín, lacasinegra, Rafa Montilla, Marçal Fores, Familia Samitier-Celma
As a follow up to our earlier post regarding the debut of Bot & Dolly’s mind-boggling short, “Box,” (above) we’re sharing an interview with the team as well as a behind the scenes video produced with The Creators Project.
Behind the Scenes
This behind the scenes film contains interviews with GMunk (Bradley G Munkowitz), BOX’s Design Director and Tarik Abdel-Gawad, BOX’s Creative Director together with behind scenes footage from the making of BOX.
Interview with Bot & Dolly’s Tarik Abdel Gawad, Creative and Technical director on “Box”
Can you please confirm for our readers that none of the box visuals were comped in post?
Yes, this is a capture of a physical performance. The visuals are not added in post.
Where did the idea for this project come from? Was it commissioned?
Box is an internal project that grew naturally out the the intersection of art and technology at Bot & Dolly. We have a great interdisciplinary team of designers and engineers that made the project possible.
From the start, the exploration of classical magic fit with our creative process. Magicians have a long history of mixing technology with performance and the categories of classical magic were perfect inspiration for the geometric illusions in Box.
Can you tell us a little more about the robots? What are those robots normally used for?
The spec sheets on the Bot & Dolly website are the best source of information on our robots.
How did you work out the choreography between the performer and the robots?
Working out the choreography was a process of rehearsal and iteration. For mainly practical reasons it was actually me performing. I had the most experience operating the robots, and since this was an internal project, rehearsals often took place at night. Each robot weighs around one and a half tons so it takes awhile to get comfortable moving around them, and safety is important.
How did you track the movement of the surfaces by the projector? Was it all preprogrammed based on the robots’ movements?
The projectors and robots are all calibrated within the same coordinate frame. Bot & Dolly’s software, BDMove, makes its possible to synchronize graphic content with robotic motion.
What was the design process for this like? Where did you start? And did you need to test and iterate a bit before getting it down?
We would start with a category of classical magic and begin exploring limited narratives made up of only abstract geometric shapes and a single performer. During the animation phase we relied on quick hand drawings and moving blocks around a table to communicate ideas because it was nearly impossible to describe something just with words.
Choosing the right geometry was very important to creating the illusion of depth, and directly affects the robotic motion. The primary illusion is created by transforming the geometry of the physical 4’ by 8’ canvas mounted to the robotic arm, through projection.
In the first section, “Transformation”, we extrude the canvas into a cube. Later on we combine two canvases to form a larger hinging shape, which in return affects the robotic animation. We tried to make each section build upon the last, and we were always learning something based on what was just completed. By the end, we ended up with a very complex environment, the performer is inside of the projected volume, there are holes in the floor and line drawing on the back wall.
What was the most challenging aspect of the job?
The difficult part is that you don’t know exactly how something will turn out until you’ve seen it projected in the space. Even then it changes with the environment’s lighting, which is also synchronized with the graphic content and robotic movement.
Many software applications were used on this project in conjunction with BDMove. It’s a very collaborative process with a lot of creative control, so it takes a lot of time and iteration to get to the point where everyone is happy.
What’s next for you?
I’m not sure. One of the things I love about working at Bot & Dolly is that we tackle a wide range of problems, both on the creative and technical side. There are applications in a variety of fields for the technology demonstrated in box, which makes it hard to predict the next thing.
Michael Langan’s new short film Heliotropes is fresh off the film fest circuit. Heliotropes documents the parallel goals of man and nature, through the most primitive and sophisticated means, to simply stay in the light. Based on the poem by Brian Christian.
You might remember Langan’s previous film Doxology, which mixed stop-motion and live-action to create an experimental comedy about tennis balls, dancing cars and God.
Charlex has recently created Shape Shifter, a larger-than-life film that’s been attracting remarkable attention online since its release. From the pieces of an exploded car, a constantly-transforming creature is born, while a fantastic environment unfolds under its feet. It’s a piece full of fluid transitions and finely-tuned visuals, directed by Alex Weil, who kindly shared some insights with Motionographer (full interview here).
“Because it begins with a series of shots of a car at night, the piece is clearly set up like a car commercial, but the film itself breaks down in a stream of conscious fashion and turns into a dream where it becomes unclear what is subject and what is object. As if in a dream, scenarios change suddenly and fluidly; the setting and characters go back and forth between a state of order and one of chaos.”
Visually, it is flawless, with its outstanding transformations and realistic organic animations. Then, there’s the whispered narration by Gabriel Byrne and subtle sound design that combine for the dreamy effect. However, what makes Shape Shifter even more solid is it’s core idea, as explains Diana Park, designer and co-director of the film:
“My initial concept was based around the idea of genesis — the birth and evolution of life. I also wanted to play with the idea of reversing the role of the machine as a creator rather than creation. These concepts led to my first draft and treatment involving a car driving in middle of the night which then enters into a dream like state. As the real world fades away and reality shifts, the car fragments into meteors that take us into a new world where nothing exists. As the meteorites land they trigger life and create a multitude of fauna and flora. The world begins to form and we follow the story of predator and prey in a heated chase that then shifts from land to sea as we watch a school of fish continue the journey. The story then culminates in a fantastic leap through the surface as the creatures transform into flight and take us off into the sunset of a new world.”
The directors stressed that during the completion of the film a lot of space was given for creative input from the whole team (up to 15 artists), in an example of “an extremely collaborative effort”, as Alex says. “The project was a work of love from everyone”, adds Diana. The result can be seen in every frame.
Building on the tradition of Classic Greek literature, NOMINT takes us on a surreal journey that is both comedic and tragic. Their unique characters, architectural design, and compelling audio challenge the viewer to step outside the boundaries of conventional Motion Graphics. We meet a larger than life beast invested with the powers of Life and Music, yet subject to the whims of scientists and audiences that seem tiny in relation to the Holy Chicken. This piece explores the fine line between worship and exploitation through humor, surprise, and irony.
Creative Director Yannis Konstantinidis shares about the process after the jump.
What inspired the overall aesthetic and approach?
The process of the project was quite unorthodox to us, as we didn’t have a script or even a narrative to work with, like we are used to. Instead the project evolved through visual concepts. We first thought of a huge monster, then we thought that the monster could be some sort of multi-headed poultry. Then we said what if this monster lived inside a building and we could see through the building. This added a narrative quality to the project and many ideas (like the sentimental male head) started developing at that moment. Of course the above process wasn’t that straightforward and it took us more or less 3 months before anything really made any sense at all!!
Themes like science, scientific process, natural selection, evolution and creation, many times end up in some way or another in our projects. Both Christos and I who directed, as well as Marilena who was the assistant director on this project, have studied architecture which was an obvious influence. As far as architecture goes, it’s methodology is something that resonates with us in every project. It was therefore especially enjoyable that for this project we even got to do proper, detailed plans, sections and interiors and we got to see the finished “product” in a few months, rather than a few years! Another thing that influenced us was that during preproduction we were also working on the video projections for Handel’ s beautiful baroque opera “Theodora” for the Athens concert hall! This collaboration came in the right moment to put the operatic spin to the concept.
Although the spot is strangely surreal and magical, it also seems to speak of sadness and loneliness. Are their certain feelings you hope your audience will experience?
Early on in the process we created a mood animatic from various sketches, just to explore the mood we were going for. After that we knew that the project will be both surreal and comedic but also evoke some feeling of isolation. As the project progressed the character(s) of the Beast started becoming clearer and clearer. Their idiosyncrasies and the suggestive nature of the story leave lots of room for personal interpretation. Some people laugh when the chicken appears for the first time and some respond with a sweet/ sad “awww” when the male head cries in the night scene.
Mood animatic
I think the story touches on themes that naturally allude to a second level of reading but when we were coming up with it, we never thought past the chicken that creates all life through music. When working on the project there weren’t any specific metaphors or symbolisms that we wanted to communicate. The story is after all a life account, by definition more complicated than a single message. It is bound to be saturated in metaphors, contradictions and a full spectrum of emotions. All these emerged naturally through the narrative and the characteristics of the Beast.
There are some really interesting techniques used in the spot such as a monumental sense of scale, where the Chicken seems bigger than life. Please tell us about the process of establishing the style / look of this piece?
As the project started from a strictly visual concept: A gigantic chicken monster standing next to a building full of people somewhere out there. Scale, light, level of detail were quite intrinsic to the idea. But as the narrative started evolving, things turned around and form started following function instead of the other way round. We spent many hours discussing how the eggs could get to the top floor to be hatched and then back down to be painted. Most of this thought process might not be very apparent to the final result but actually helped a lot with the development of the narrative.
What software did you use in the production of this spot?
The building was fully designed in autocad and we had visual references for the look and feel of each room to the wallpaper and fixings! After that the actual production of the project was pretty straightforward and we didnt encounter any serious hiccups. The 3D modeling and rendering was done in 3D studio Max and the compositing in AE.
Which was your personal favorite phase of production/ scene to work on?
This was one of these projects that changed significantly from the first idea to the moment we went into production. It was not only an exercise in style but also an experiment of a more haphazard way of writing and authoring. The pre-production stage lasted roughly 3 months in which time we changed the design, style and narrative several times. We went back and forth several times and it sometimes felt that the story is getting absolutely nowhere. There was one particular ‘eureka’ moment when all our ideas just came and it was this great feeling of cracking the code.
Can you describe the culture / work environment of your studio?
Within the last couple of years our studio rapidly grew into a very closely knit team of 9. We do commercial projects and we also indulge in more personal work where quite often the whole team participates in every step of the concept and production stages. Its definitely a team work culture with lots of discussions and communal idea generation. The core of our creative work is the directing team and the design team that influence one another. Next to the creative department is our lovely production team that makes sure we have everything we need to realize the vision: resources, collaborators, time etc.
Credits
Direction/ Design/ Animation:
NOMINT nomint.gr
Direction:
Christos Lefakis, Yannis Konstantinidis
Concept/Creative Direction:
Christos Lefakis, Yannis Konstantinidis Director’ s Assistant: Marilena Vatseri
Inactivo is the latest short film by Lamole, the B side of Argentinian Superestudio. It’s about a woodcutter’s brave journey through a gloomy forest of giant scissors. Facing his childhood fears, he walks towards his final redemption. The finely crafted opening credits and sound design adds a nice touch to this intense drama.
“We looked for the best way to figuratively represent the inside of a traumatised mind, and we ended up deciding to shoot the main body of the film in the forest, on 16mm film, and the main title sequence in the studio. The challenge of the post-production stage was to work with a great range of aesthetic and quality resources, in the subtle framework of constructing a realistic world that denoted ‘little intervention’, leading to this bizarre world”
Superestudio’s Reel shows how the studio has a substantial commercial repertoire, so it’s great to see them dedicate some time to non-commercial projects!
My first introduction to French duo Gangpol & Mit (Guillaume Castagne and Sylvain Quément) was through their music. It wasn’t until recently that I learned they are as involved in the creation of animation as they are in concocting their unique blend of electronica.
Their latest DVD, Faits Divers (Pictoplasma Publishing), is a collection of 18 audio-visual offspring from Gangpol & Mit’s collaborative relationship. According to Pictoplasma, “Guillaume emails some graphics to Sylvain, who then composes a melody and sends it back – or Sylvain coughs up a tune and has Guillaume translate it into animated worlds.”
The introductory essay for Faits Divers from Peter Thaler and Lars Denicke builds an interesting context for the DVD, albeit in the affected language of an art exhibition. The thrust is this: “Eat technology before technology eats you.” This cultural wariness underscores much of the DVD’s contents: Gangpol & Mit are clearly in command of the technology they use to create their audio-visual works, and yet they seem to hold it at arm’s length, choosing to exercise only a certain level of sophistication, never more. in this, they remind of the Amish, who have decided that wheelbarrows and ovens are acceptable technologies, while everything else is regarded with suspicion.
As with all of Gangpol & Mit’s music, the soundtrack is a precise melange of meticulously crafted electronic hooks that mixes a staggering array of retro-flavored synths with Baroque fugues and campy musical devices. Melodies run and jump like Super Mario himself, and warm analogue pads wrap around your head with nostalgic charm.
The visuals, while equally controlled, are comprised of rudimentary vector shapes and gradients, animated in simple, mostly linear movements. If 8-bit Nintendo characters could reproduce and evolve, they might have grown into something like the cast of Faits Divers. In terms of its intentionally sophomoric execution and its left-field content, the animation reminds me of cut-scenes from the Katamari Damacy franchise. Colorful, simple and weird.
Gangpol & Mit juxtapose cultural ephemera like well-traveled DJs, mashing up new and old, familiar and obscure, high and low. Aztec warriors hurl cell phones at each other in a video game brawl, a James Bond-esque hero ingests a psychoactive plant, and a man riding a flying armchair considers cutting off his own arm to rid himself of an evil hand-puppet. Every moment of seemingly cheery sentiment is undercut by a quiet violence, a disturbance of some sort.
The contents of the DVD are grouped into loose categories: Clips/Stories, Activities, Art with Heart and Archives. Clips/Stories are loosely narrative sequences focusing on the misadventures of a motley cast of characters. Activities are stand-alone vignettes that often combine spoken word and music. Art with Heart is a series of three “interviews” with fictional artist characters, each of whom suffers from a unique form of narcissism. Archives contains three animations from the back-catalog of Gangpol & Mit: “Chinese Slavery,” “A Few Elements of Vocabulary” and “How to Play Ping-Pong.”
The accompanying 32-page booklet is handsomely produced and re-presents some of the DVD’s films as sequential art, complete with typographic annotations that shed a little light on the sometimes elusive narratives.
My only complaint: I wish the audio was available separately, either as an optional download or on a separate disc. While I appreciate the visuals, I want to listen to Gangpol & Mit so I can create my own stories to accompany their delightfully twisted tunes.
Note: Faits Divers is a PAL DVD. For more information and to purchase, visit Pictoplasma.
While many other motion studios try to find their way to the interactive future, Psyop teamed up with the digital aces at The Barbarian Group and went there.
The Barbarian Group conceived of the project and it’s their custom nerd voodoo that powers the Psyop-made content featuring cover boy Robert Downey Jr., actor Jeremy Renner and hottie Gillian Jacobs.
Do you read, view or play with the issue? All of the above. It’s like print, motion and interactive media got a little loose together and – bow chicka wow wow! – birthed this futuristic love child.
The experience requires a download from the Esquire siteand a physical copy of the December 2009 issue. Or does it? Some clever Googling may get you to at least some of the AR markers.
Jeff Scher: I Got My Job Through the NY Times. Short Documentary by Reid Rosefelt.
Jeffery Noyes Scher was born in 1954 and graduated from Bard College in 1976. He has since then made well over one hundred films, mixing both painting, typography, graphic elements and film to create beautifully vibrant and emotionally charged works. Scher draws inspiration from everyday life, he is a poetic observer, a modern day Baudelaire enjoying the limitless boundaries of experimentation. To watch his films, is to engage in a moment of pure emotion and a visual spectacle that has you eager to repeat.
I personally was introduced to his work back in 2007, at the outset of his project for The New York Times. At that time, Scher had been asked to do a series of works in which he was to create one film every month for the TimeSelect column. His first piece, ‘L’Eau Life’ is a colourful display of the pleasures of water, full of joy and utterly playful. Each frame is a painting in itself, 2,141 in all make up the short film.
Twenty four films on, the collection is testament to his untiring ability to express beauty and emotion through the medium of motion. For the release of his latest work, ‘The Shadow’s Dream’, I decided to catch up with him and ask a few questions about the project, his process and his love for early experimental film.
Interview with Jeff Scher
What was your initial interest in making your paintings move?
It actually always struck me as odd that paintings didn’t move. Paintings, I think originally did move; cave paintings when viewed by torch light flickered and jittered when viewed. Painting on flat surfaces always struck me as frozen. Dead. The lack of motion being a contrived artifice and without life. How magic it is when they “come to life” by moving… or animation. Motion is the strongest indication of life. Motion captures time, a still image is such a narrow slice it seems like a microscope slide, a transection with a very narrow context – frozen and flat- only the most limited view. Time and motion; that’s where the action is!
How many films have you made now? And how many for the NY Times?
Actually that’s a hard question. I shoot all the time. 16mm until a few years ago and now mostly digital. I’m not sure if all my footage is one big film or a real lot of little ones. The number of films that are “finished” – with titles and credits… I guess it must be well over a hundred… There are about a dozen films I finished but never really showed anywhere, and then there are the commercials, about fifty or so? Show openings, another dozen there, trailers another dozen… Films I shot for other people as DP, maybe another dozen there. Films I acted in, three or four… and I “produced” a few other films too with other people “directing”. For the Times it’s been about one a month, or twenty four as of this October.
For the NY Times series, were you given any specific brief?
No. Kind of an incredible deal. The op-ed Art director Brian Rea, had seen a bunch of my films at an AIGA conference and a little film festival I used to run with Kurt Andersen upstate, and then later at a gallery in Chelsea. He basically wanted more of the same. The idea was to make something extra for Times readers online, back when they had to pay to get the editorial sections. Also it was to replace Maira Kalman’s column, as she was in need of a break after her run. Maira’s work is lovely, intimate and personal paintings and text. They were a big hit with readers and they were looking for something to plug into the spot she’d created a sizable following for.
It was like Hans Richter used to say about his montage and title work; “they wanted a little flower in their button-hole”. In the two years since I’ve been associated with the Times I’ve never had any editorial direction of any kind. And I get the editorial talents of my editor George Kalogerakis for the text I write to accompany the films. I really just have been making the kind of films I want to. Although I have learned a lot about who is watching and what works in this context. That has influenced the films in some ways, but all of them good I think. They are shorter, and more thematic then the bigger montage films I’d made in the past. But I am really enjoying the focus this has brought to the films.
What techniques are you using to animate your paintings?
I guess the signature style is traditional rotoscope. But I’ve been working with lots of other techniques too. Fly By Night was just charcoal of paper, Yours is splatter paintings layered up via an Oxberry shooting through mattes, Trigger Happy and Paperview were stop motion, Grand Central was live photography shot through prisms, etc… And then there’s a batch of live action, including the current one. It’s live action… but it’s like rotoscoping only with the sun on pavement instead of paint on paper…
Where do your initial ideas come from for a film?
From looking at everyday things with a sense of mischief and awe.
What are you looking to express most in your films?
The sense of wonder at how complex and beautiful life in this world is. And I want to do it with emotion, not intellect. I always felt the intellect was the place where the lawyers live and if you can break through it or sneak around it you can have much more impact and deeper resonance. I think what I look for is emotional truths.
What are the essential elements that help you in gaining that goal. Put differently, which elements (graphic, sonic, technical…) serve best in expressing those qualities?
It’s always motion. It’s how things move. Paper can become fireworks, ink and paint can become emotional truths. It’s all how it moves. The motion signature of anything in motion carries with it instant recognition. The manipulation of that motion impacts on the emotion. A line shot across the screen in four frames is an arrow. A line that limps across the screen is old and tired, mortal and sad. I am a fisherman for modes of motion.
You describe yourself as an experimental film maker. In what way is it experimental, rather what are you experimenting with?
I like “experimental” because it frees me from most pre-existing categories. They are also genuine experiments, sometimes for techniques and sometimes for content. They all start with a “what if…” So in that sense they are a series of exercises on a theme that are all answers to questions… “What would it look like if I…” And sometimes it’s just a color combination – like mixing colors in cinema time by progressions of different tones and textures… And sometimes it’s a bigger technical question, like in YOURs, where the question was what would happen if I replace a conventional film with layers of abstract images… That film was in fact a test that turned out okay. The test was the finished film.
Could you explain a little about your interest in early experimental film? What is it that fascinates you in this more experimental approach as opposed perhaps to mainstream cinema and animation?
I grew up on experimental film, but was always drawn to the more polished filmmakers like Warren Sonbert, Kenneth Anger, Peter Kubelka, Hans Richter, Oskar Fischinger, Walter Ruttman, Muphy/Leger and Vertov.
Early experimental film is just wonderful. I have 16mm prints of many of them and watch them all several times a year. I like to use them in teaching, as I find I always have some new insight into what’s in them. “Ballet Mechanique” and “Ghosts before Breakfast” for example contain all the seeds for almost every experimental film made since. When I watch a Hans Richter film, I get the same feeling that you might get listening to a great Rolling Stones song. I think a good experimental film is like rock and roll for the eyes.
Mainstream cinema is in the straightjacket of narrative. The big problem with narrative is that the story telling grammar has such strict rules. Dialogue is really a bore to shoot. There’s a right place to put the camera and then it’s up to the actor. It’s less filmmaking then framemaking. When you toss the story and the actors, suddenly the whole world opens up as your pallet. And you don’t have to get anyone’s permi$$ion to make a film. You just get a camera and see where it takes you. I also have come to dislike scripts.
I’m an okay writer, but I’m a terrible reader. I write and make notes for and about films constantly. I fill about four substantial notebooks a year with this sort of stuff, but I never ever read or refer to them. I think it’s the act of writing that helps me muddle ideas around. But the product is always in my head and the notebooks are a kind of graveyard of process.
When I start a film I usually only have a place to start. The film itself only emerges as I work on it. I build the films brick at a time, and the form usually emerges as it develops. I guess it’s more along the lines of how a painter might work. Making my own rules as I go is the best way for me to work.
If I had to explain what I was doing as I did it, or worse, before I did it, it would be death. When I talk to Shay (Shay Lynch) about the music we almost always talk about the emotion of the film, and the tempo. Subject too, of course, but that’s even less important than the emotion. I generally have a good idea of what the feeling of the film will be.
You have also worked on commercial pieces. How is this different, from your experience, to working alone?
Commercial work is kind of fun. And there are all different degrees of “commercial”. When I make a trailer for a festival or museum I generally have a lot of freedom anyhow. The IFC trailer was actually an experiment I had in mind for a long time, and the budget for it let me work with top of the line people and equipment that I would never spend my own money on. So it was like a corporate experimental film. The “Real Sex” open was a spin on a film I made with Cecily Brown, so it was like getting paid to make a sequel.
The more commercial commercials, like the spots I recently did for St. Mary’s Hospital were much narrower in freedom content-wise, but a wonderful opportunity to explore over the top realism in rotoscope. I like the challenge of commercial work, and I love the opportunity to be “professional”. It can also be refreshing not to have to carry the invention of content over a film and really revel in pushing technique.
Because I keep such a small studio, a commercial job brings with it months of subsequent economic freedom. The commercial sponsors are my Medici’s. I’ve always been kind of an odd choice for commercials, when I get them, they tend to want me to do something along the lines of what I have done or am doing, so it’s really not such a stretch. I should add that I have a lot of “repeat” clients, so it’s a nice excuse to work with people I’ve become friends with. Lately I’ve had a lot of help from assistants too. On the bigger jobs it’s just not possible to do everything myself and it’s always nice to have other voices in my 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.
While many other motion studios try to find their way to the interactive future, 
