Hasta La Motion!

This week’s RE:PLAY films come from Alexander Gellner and David Wilson. Fellas, take it away…

ALEXANDER GELLNER – “HOW TO GET IDEAS”

“I was thinking a lot about concepts of creativity and the exploitation of ideas. On the one hand, you can’t really steal ideas, only share them. To make a solution public and enable collaboration, raises the potential of one small idea and things can build on each other. The whole CreativeCommons movement is based on this concept. But in a competitive, entrepreneur driven environment, sharing may not be perceived as the ideal and the value increases by being the sole vendor of one idea/solution.
The famous “I drink your milkshake” scene in “There will be blood” finally gave me a visual shorthand for this paradox. I used collage technique instead of my usual lineart, because collage art is unapologetic about appropriating and building on work that other people have made for you. ”

DAVID WILSON – “LIFE AS AN INDEPENDENT ASTRONAUT”

“I didn’t want to start with a blank piece of paper on this one. In fact, I decided to step away from my desk completely and start with some fabric, card, scissors and glue, and I made this space suit. The process of doing and making is very therapeutic for me. Over the few days that it took me to create the suit, I developed the character of who lived inside it. Developing the script and costume side-by-side made a lot of sense to me, and was refreshing to start from a different angle. Ultimately, the life of John Barlow, our Independent Astronaut revolves around the importance of inner peace and finding acceptance.”

Posted on Motionographer

This week, we have RE:PLAY films from Holbrooks, Physalia and Mixtape Club. Another great line-up of talented directors approaching the idea of happiness, joy and synchronicity in clever ways. We’ll let the artists speak for themselves…

MIXTAPE CLUB – “HELLO I LIKE YOU”

‘”When presented with the creative brief, we thought what better way to express our happiness than to distill the essence of our craft, to serve up a creamy shot of artistic espresso? So with this film, we’ve gone back to the basics: the simplest of inanimate objects, and transformed them into a tapestry of playful, choreographed dance for your enjoyment.

The goal here was simply to explore materials, themes, and techniques that have always made us happy – the things that drew us to this crazy art form in the first place. Like music. The whole process started with some simple visual experiments, and using those initial kernels as a starting point, we worked back and forth with our favorite tuneful youngsters, Huma-Huma, to develop the score for this piece. The music and the visuals evolved organically together, with each new version inspiring something in the other. We always find it particularly satisfying to develop the sound as part of the process itself.”

PHYSALIA – “INDUCTANCE”

“Inductance is the making-of for a piece that will never exist, a behind the scenes with no scenes! When faced with the challenge of creating a short under the theme of happiness, we first concluded with Gerardo del Hierro that whether the short was going to overtly address the theme or not, what we really wanted was to enjoy the process. We have always loved to share the making-of’s for our pieces, not only because we usually have fun developing tools that allow us to create them (sometimes in a very masochistic sort of way!) but because we understand as professionals that part of the enjoyment of watching a piece comes from finding out how the hell it was done.

The choice of the device to build came shortly after, spurred by some painful trial-error process and being the colour balls from the F5 logo the last inspiration spark we needed. The video is a document of how the happiest machine Physalia has built to date came to exist.”

HOLBROOKS – “VELO CEREBRUM”

“We wanted to take a dry look at the subject of happiness. To strip down the aesthetics of a smile, literally tearing skin from flesh, flesh from bone, bone cracking away. We wanted to expose the brain and let it reveal the spirituality and enigma of happiness. Of a simple action that makes this person happy in a way that they’d find hard to describe.”

Posted on Motionographer

Several days ago, we received the latest from MAKE: a knock down, drag out homage to film noir style crime dramas of old Hollywood, called Palm Springs. The piece was created for the Palm Springs International ShortFest, which runs from June 22nd – June 28th. Rather than opining on the merits of the work, we asked MAKE’s Director and Lead Animator for the opener, Andrew Chesworth, to summarize how the team of artists executed the piece, in detail:

“Palm Springs was created using primarily traditional animation drawn directly into Photoshop with Wacom Cintiq tablets.  The idea was to achieve the aesthetic of classical animation but to do it in a completely paperless fashion.   The creative workflow was near identical to that of traditional analog animation – starting with rough layouts buried in construction lines, and gradually working toward more finished scenes through a layering process of drawing.   In several scenes, assistants in-betweened and touched up the drawings of key animators, and finished animation was passed on to the colorists who painted each frame of animation with the dry-brush styling.

3D animation was employed for a handful of inorganic subjects, such as the vehicles in the car chase, the ceiling fan in the office, and the movie projector.  The modeling, animation, and rendering was all done in Maya.  Mental Ray’s contour shader was employed to achieve the outlines on the objects, and the models were built very specifically to accommodate the line work to match the drawn designs.  Hard shadow render passes, animated texture overlays, and a great deal of rotoscoped hand-drawn effects were composited onto the 3D elements to mesh them within the hand-drawn world as much as possible.

Compositing was all done in After Effects, where additional treatments were placed over the drawn elements to achieve a more analog aesthetic.  Subtle texture overlays, diffusion filters, and in many cases film grain and noise were added to conform the elements.”

For more, check out the Q&A and behind-the-scenes artwork that went into creating the opener here.

Posted on Motionographer

Indeed, Twenty120 has come to pass. Not long ago, screenings for the festival went underway, drawing in artists across the board, and cooking up a body of work ranging from abstract animation to live action.

For those oblivious to the event, Twenty120 is a stockpile of 20 independent films that each span a length of 120 seconds. Rid of any professional constraints, artists were given full creative license, but posed to frame their work around this year’s theme, “In The Age of Opulence.”

While we at Motionographer where pleased at the overall quality from all the works, we where especially impressed by Wrights of Spring (Bryce Wymer, Daniel Pernikoff), OPRÉ (Justin Harder), and Fatty Wants A New Toy (Jon Saunders, Tony Barbieri).

Posted on Motionographer

One of the driving ideals behind F5 is the celebration of creativity for creativity’s sake. Money might make the world go ’round, but it doesn’t necessarily help you jump out of bed every morning.

In that spirit, we created the F5 RE:PLAY film festival. We invited some of our favorite studios and independent directors to create short films ranging in length from 15 seconds to 2 minutes on the topics of rejuvenation, regrowth, rebirth and/or revival. There’s no real brief; we just want people to express themselves and stretch their wings a bit.

The films will be shown on the main stage at F5 between speakers, on plasmas around the F5 event space, here on Motionographer (after the event) and on the F5 website.

The RE:PLAY lineup is as follows:

• Blacklist (Nanospore, Pistachios and Holbrooks)
• Buck
• Click 3X
• Cody Cobb
• Crush
• Digital Kitchen
• Imaginary Forces
• Luis Torres/La Flama
• Matt Lambert/1st Ave Machine
• Not To Scale/Ubik
• Ryan Rothermel/Sean Pecknold
• Saiman Chow
• Sehsucht
• Shilo
• Superfad

I’m really excited to see what everyone creates. Join us as we gather to revel in radness and restart our collective engine. Out with 2008, in with 2009!

Photo by escapehelicopter

Posted on Motionographer

F5 RE:PLAY FILM FESTIVAL