Since F5 last April, I’ve received a slew of emails asking how people can get their hands on a DVD of the F5 RE:PLAY films. Never fear: Stash has swooped in to save the day.
Stash 60 is a special two-disc set that includes 14 films created for the F5 RE:PLAY Film Festival.
As a reminder, the RE:PLAY festival invited filmmakers from around the world to create original short projects for the F5 festival last April in New York City. The result was an astounding array of innovative, memorable work that has helped keep the flame of F5 burning strong.
While we’re on the topic of Stash, we received a review copy of Short Films Vol. 1, and it’s definitely worth discussing.
Focusing on non-commercial, mostly narrative works, this DVD signals an extension of Stash’s influence to a wider, more general audience.
The 30 films (with a cumulative runtime of 2:32) include work from some Motionographer favorites, including Neill Blomkamp (of District 9 fame), Roman Coppola, Gaelle Denis, Johny Kelly, Shilo, Three Legged Legs and Run Wrake. There’s also a healthy smattering of student work—all of which rivals the quality of the professional work. The majority of the collection is based in animation, but there are enough live-action and hybrid works to keep you guessing.
My honest appraisal: Short Films Vol. 1 is probably the best collection of its kind. Where other collections harbor a few duds that force you to keep your DVD remote handy, this disc is an inspiring lineup of glittering gold.
Complaints? The accompanying booklet, while informative, is a little confusing. Its contents were basically copy-and-pasted from back issues of Stash, meaning that the chapter headings don’t correlate to the actual DVD.
And I’m not a big fan of the DVD navigation. If you want to play a single film, you’ll need to recognize it by the tiny thumbnail presented on a two-screen menu system void of any descriptive text. I would have preferred a textual index. Minor quibbles though, given the quality of the work.
I’m curious to see how this release will broaden Stash’s reach. Hard-core Stashers who own the entire catalog of monthly DVDs probably will pass over this offering. But for those outside “the biz,” Short Films Vol. 1 will be an eye-opening introduction to work beamed here from some hitherto unknown universe, one full of promise and excitement.
NOTE: Motionographer and its authors receive no compensation of any sort from Stash. Review copies of materials are donated to SCAD’s Motion Media Design department.
Network branding doesn’t get a lot of attention here on Motionographer. We tend to favor the quick-cut, visual slam-dances of advertising and music videos over the comparatively conservative design systems that attempt to express a television network’s ethos.
It’s easy to forget that TV’s largest advertisers are the networks themselves. Combine IDs, graphics, promos and all the other elements of a traditional network package, and you’re staring up at a staggering mountain of deliverables—and that’s leaving out the demands of multi-platform efforts for the web, mobile devices and emerging media.
To make matters trickier still, all the elements must cohere to one another while allowing for the network to evolve, to grow.
For the first in a series of features looking at the design processes behind network branding, we enlisted the help of Dominique Elliott, Professor of Motion Media Design at SCAD. This summer, Dominique was embedded in the offices of RIOT Atlanta as they worked on launching a new integrated web/TV network called Halogen, going live today in the United States and online. She talked to creative director Jeff Doud about their process and shared her findings with us.
Happy Friday, Mographer fans! And what better way to celebrate the end of the week, than with a timely dose of ‘issue’ animation.
La Moustache, the new animation company operating out of Montreal have created these compelling animation segments for the acclaimed new documentary H2Oil. The documentary, produced by Loaded pictures exposes the ‘enterprise of epic proportions’, which is the Alberta Oil sands industry.
So what’s up with extracting oil (or bitumen rather) from Alberta’s oil sands and why do we need to know about this? Well extracting bitumen from oil sands (Often referred to as tar sands) is a hugely energy intensive process, requiring industrial scale heating (using natural gas) and 4 barrels of fresh water to produce one barrel of oil. So right there you have the depletion of the planet’s most valuable and scarce resource, clean water, along with the burning of natural gas to create another carbon emitting fuel…and so it goes on. Add to this the explosion of ‘rare’ cancers in areas where post industrial contaminated water is let back into the environment, and you have a bona fide, 100% proof environmental catastrophe on your hands. And tar sand mining is only going to increase as the world’s conventional oil wells dry up…
Despite the animation itself being rendered by the friendly hand of James Brathwaite (of I met the Walrus fame), it makes for uncomfortable viewing and in as much it does its job perfectly. Sequences are inventive and dynamic whilst tonally staying in keeping with—and never overshadowing—the subject matter.
For me, viewing this work and the trailer for the film came as a real wake-up call. I try and keep up with environmental news as best I can, yet I still thought of tar-sand mining as the institutionalized crazy uncle who’d never actually get released. After watching these clips it’s obvious that the lunatic has well and truly taken over the asylum.
Also, please remember that budgets for documentaries and specifically documentary animation are ridiculously low, especially compared to commercials and studio features. So La Moustache have almost certainly invested much of themselves into making animation of this level for a documentary film that doesn’t yet have a wide scale theatrical release.
For a fairly neutral overview of tar-sand mining check this link.
H2Oil produced by: Loaded Pictures
Animation Production: La Moustache
Narration: Catherine Kidd
Animation Directors: Dale Hayward & Sylvie Trouvé
Illustration: James Braithwaite
Animation: Dale Hayward & Sylvie Trouvé
It isn’t often that we see purely graphic animations like these spots for Tata Docomo, part of a new branding effort by Wolff Olins for a merger between two telecommunications networks in India. But in these new mnemonic animations, the elementary shapes which make up the logo come to life to become more than just a static mark. The geometric forms are modular and recombinant, reminiscent of building blocks, Colorform sets or Ed Emberly drawings: which like like the new logo can be arranged and re-arranged in many different ways. And in each of these animations the shapes are funny, playful and cheerful: characteristics that the new brand wants to embody and let its customers embrace. Simply made and charming, but not simple.
We recently posted a trailer for Hornet’s visual-collaboration with The Decemberists. However, off the tails of Monday’s premier at UCLA’s Royce Hall, it seemed appropriate to follow up with a more in-depth look, including notes from each director.
After deciding to make a film to accompany their new album, the band initially approached Jonathan Wells of Flux to curate, who in turn brought Hornet on-board to produce the pieces with three Hornet directors and a fourth. Although the assumptive budget of a project like this was a mere fraction of most commercial campaigns, this is a positive reminder that production companies are content-creation partners and curatorial entities — hopefully a sentiment that continues to permeate the mainstream.
Broken up into the four sides of the vinyl album, the directors each chose a side to work on with the decided theme of the seasons. Similar to Exquisite Corpse style projects like Psst! Pass It On, the directors were able to work independently of each other, and consulted one another when they got to the end of their section.
Here are extended cut-downs from the hour-long piece: Side A (Peter Sluszka), Side B (Julia Pott), Side C (Guilherme Marcondes) & Side D (Santa Maria)
Guilherme Marcondes:
The unifying theme for the project as a whole was “the woods”. Somehow we all did something involving trees, forests etc. To divide each director’s segment we created quick graphical transitions representing the four seasons. My segment, for instance, was connected to the previous by autumnal falling leaves and to the following one by a shower of snowflakes.
I developed my segment along with artist Andrezza Valentin. We wanted to do something that would look like an environment for the band to perform in front of. It should be an animated set-design that would hopefully transport the audience into that world, providing a special context for the songs to be performed. we didn’t go literal on the interpretation of the lyrics. The idea was to enhance the overall mood of the music. Our sequence of songs was the darkest in the album (which I liked very much) so we decided to go for some eerie symbolism combined with more abstract psychedelic moments. There were several elements representing the passing of time like the sun, the moon, an eclipse, ruins and human bones.
I used a high speed camera (Phantom) to shot some elements. Other elements were illustrations or photographs. Everything was composed later in After Effects. The biggest challenge was to create such a long duration film in a relatively short amount of time.
Peter Sluszka:
Listening to the Hazards of Love, an animist theme becomes apparent very early on in the narrative. I wanted to explore this aspect of the story and how it related to the mysterious, forest environment, which is why I focused on vegetation and organic elements, shooting them as if they were animated by the same spirits driving the plot and protagonists. Musically, the Prelude is stark and minimal, transitioning to a fuller second track that evokes a sense of travel and discovery. Visually, the film mirrors this progression, starting with a void as seeds spiral in hypnotically, resolving in a dense, overgrown forrest that helps establish an ambiance and mood for all the narrative to come. The third and fourth tracks continue in this vein, with animated leaves, trees, mushrooms, and flowers synced to the music in an abstract interplay with the plot and characters.
All four tracks from the first side combine high speed footage shot on the Phantom camera with stop-motion animation, photographed largely on a multi-plane set up.
Santa Maria:
After we listened to the album and heard the lyrics a few times, we decided that we should shoot video. We thought of something that could be eerie and a little unnerving as well as magical and nostalgic. So we decided to literally go into the forest with a camera a bright light and a fog machine. In the end it was more or less an experiment, along with an abstract story about shooting stars.
The band didn’t want to dwell on the lyrics so much so we decided to make a piece based on the feeling of the music. Overall the music flows very naturally and is a strange mix of beauty and sadness… we tried our best to match that with melancholy imagery.
Julia Pott
Some of the imagery was based upon diagrams and drawings found in science text books. I also borrowed from old nature magazines and journals to create a collaged background to set off the hand drawn animation. I wanted to make each scene like a moving illustration. I looked at the naive style that is currently popular in contemporary illustration. I have a whole bunch of National Geographics from the 80’s which I used as a reference for the animal characters. The season that I was assigned was summer. I tried to use imagery that I associated with summer but without being overtly bright and warm. By setting most of the film at night I could use summery imagery whilst maintaining a sinister edge. When working on more commercial projects you’re often required to squeeze a lot of information into a very short amount of time. It’s been great to work on a project in which there is opportunity to let the work breathe and use a slower. It’s also a rare chance to work alongside other filmmakers to be part of a bigger picture
CREDITS:
Client: Capitol Records
Agency: Flux
Creative Directors: Jonathan Wells and Meg Wells (Flux)
Production Company: Hornet Inc.
Executive Producers: Michael Feder (Hornet Inc.), Jonathan Wells (Flux)
Producer: Hana Shimizu (Hornet Inc.)
Editor: Anita Chao (Hornet Inc.)
(Side A)
Director: Peter Sluszka
Editor: Anita Chao
Compositor: Andrew Macfarlane
Fabricator: Matt Christensen, Connie Chan
Live Action Producer: Joel Kretschman
DP: Othmar Dickbauer
Gaffer: Michael Yetter
Key Grip: Joe Mandeville
Art Dept.: Tim McDonald, Kevin Coyle
(Side B)
Director: Julia Pott
Assistant Director: Robin Bushell
Compositors: Matt Layzell, Danny Boyle, Tom Brown
Animation Assistant: Rosie Miles
(Side C)
Director: Guilherme Marcondes
Art Direction: Andrezza Valentin and Guilherme Marcondes
3D Artist: Diogo Kalil
Live Action Producer: Joel Kretschman
DP: Othmar Dickbauer
Gaffer: Michael Yetter
Key Grip: Joe Mandeville
Art Dept.: Tim McDonald, Kevin Coyle
(Side D)
Director: Santa Maria
Key Grip: Sarah Edney
Management: Jason Colton and Ron Laffitte for Red Light Management
Special Thanks: Dan Cohen, Danny Lockwood, Sharon Lord, Shawn Kirkham, Cem Kurosman, Angelique Groh, Zack Kortright, John Harrison, Michael Yetter
Love Letter is a project by Stephen Powers with the City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program and is sponsored by the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage through the Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative.
I’m really digging this new spot from animation master Ruff Mercy for O’Neill to promote their upcoming snowboard event in Davos. His personal illustration style and unique color palette gives the spot its distinctive look. But it’s the tight combination of high-energy animation, pacing and editing that give the spot its visceral impact. What I love the most are the custom-made and hand-animated “digital” distortion effects. Nice touch!
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.
Comprised of London VFX veterans Mario Ucci and Rick Thiele, Blacknail Pictures created this stunning piece for Breast Cancer awareness for IBCC via Ogilvy, São Paulo. The simple concept: excuses let Breast Cancer grow.
This visual metaphor could have stopped as a simple typographic solution. However, it ended as visceral and cinematic experience. The beauty of the fluid movement, renders and lighting captivate, allowing for the message to seep into your subconscious.
This labor of love was pulled off by just the two of them (with the support of Passion Pictures) while busy in their day jobs on feature films.
Agency: Ogilvy, São Paulo
Art Directors: Fernando Reis, Guilherme Nobrega (Ruivo!)
Copywriter: Marcelo Padoca
Head of Art: Denis Kakazu
Creative Directors: Anselmo Ramos, Fred Saldanha
Production: Blacknail Pictures
Director: Rick Thiele
Photography Director: Mario Ucci
Editor: Rick Thiele
Sound: Dr. DD/Bonde Fumegante
Comprised of London VFX veterans Mario Ucci and Rick Thiele, Blacknail Pictures created this stunning piece for Breast Cancer awareness for IBCC via Ogilvy, São Paulo. The simple concept: excuses let Breast Cancer grow.
This visual metaphor could have stopped as a simple typographic solution. However, it ended as visceral and cinematic experience. The beauty of the fluid movement, renders and lighting captivate, allowing for the message to seep into your subconscious.
This labor of love was pulled off by just the two of them (with the support of Passion Pictures) while busy in their day jobs on feature films.
Agency: Ogilvy, São Paulo
Art Directors: Fernando Reis, Guilherme Nobrega (Ruivo!)
Copywriter: Marcelo Padoca
Head of Art: Denis Kakazu
Creative Directors: Anselmo Ramos, Fred Saldanha
Production: Blacknail Pictures
Director: Rick Thiele
Photography Director: Mario Ucci
Editor: Rick Thiele
Sound: Dr. DD/Bonde Fumegante
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.
