Sometimes when you are trawling the infinite ocean that is the inter-web, you come across a little treasure that makes you wonder how on earth you missed them first time around. This is one of those cases!
It’s a simple tale of a lonely little boy in search of a playmate with a good dash of darkness thrown in for good measure! Cute, enchantingly naive animation style with a great sense for comedy timing.
I managed to interrupt Chris’ busy schedule to give use a quick insight into the techniques used to create the video:
We shot the people spinning on turntables at 33.3rpm at high speed and then matched them to the turntables which were working with Serato. The film was made in collaboration with The Scratch Perverts, Foreign Beggars, Shlomo and Will Clarke with sound design by Will Cohen. Post production by The Mill London.
For more information drop by the Neurosonics Audiomedical website. Be sure to check out the production stills, guaranteed to brighten up your day and put a smile on your face!
Twenty120 is around the corner and we have a few announcements that we would like to share. Firstly, as a reminder, this Thursday night at 7pm Twenty120 is releasing its third annual collection of films at the Art Directors Club in New York. If the twenty great films aren’t enough to bring you out, they will also be providing free drinks along with the an all event set from DJ Chrismix.
The free admissions are now closed. Hope you made the cut!
Along with those details we are happy to announce that Twenty120 put aside 50 free admissions for us to dish out to the Motionographer readers who want to come join the fun. What you need to do is email rsvp@twenty120.com (check the invite linked above) and say that Motionographer sent you. It is on a first come first serve basis so act fast. For those of you who wont be able to make it to the show, Motionographer is offering a web premiere of the 20 films. From the hours of 7-11pm Eastern Time on Thursday, tune into Motionographer, we will have a clip of all the films to watch, but dont wait until later because we are pulling the plug as soon as the clock strikes 11pm.
Twenty120 brings amazing opportunities to the creatives in this field, so I’ve been perplexed by how many people don’t know about the annual series. After my first meeting Connor Swegle I learned a good deal about the history of Twenty120 and saw how invested he is in it’s future. Which drove me to have an official interview with both Connor and Rich Rama, the two men behind Twenty120.
Nexus Productions’ directing duo Fx and Mat put their powers to use for the International Olympic Committee and agency Coler & Weber United in “All Together Now,” a beautifully rendered tale of titanic Olympians literally pulling the earth’s geography together into a neo-Pangea.
Like their work for the Royal Bank of Canada (through Parisian prodco Mr. Hyde), “All Together Now” uses soft lighting and a rich palette to evoke a sunny, feel-good vibe reminiscent of Art Deco’s happier imagery. The contours of the characters remind me of Tamara de Lempicka’s hefty but friendly human forms—just without all the sitting around and pouting.
Credits Full credits requested
Agency: Coler & Weber United
Production: Nexus Productions
Direction: Fx & Mat
Back in July, I scribbled out a diatribe against Mass Animation, a Facebook-supported competition to create a CG short film by crowd-sourcing the animation to thousands of animators around the world. (See trailer above.)
While most of the Motionographer regulars agreed with my points against Mass Animation, not everyone felt that spec-work competitions like Mass Animation are a bad thing.
To help flesh out the other side of the story, we got in touch with Alexander Micah Snow, Mass Animation participant and then animation student at the Savannah College of Art and Design. We edited his response for length, but left it otherwise in tact.
Let’s keep the conversation going in the comments.
In Support of Mass Animation
By Alexander Snow
Not too long ago, I was checking my Facebook to see if anything new was going on, or if as usual, somebody had taken a hideous picture of me without me knowing. This is when I first caught a glance at the feed about something called Mass Animation. As soon as I read a few lines of the description, I was hooked:
A chance to work with professionals, especially from such great studios as Sony Imageworks and ReelFX, was an opportunity I wasn’t gonna miss.
Benefits
For one, it was a great way to get your name out there and network, whether you win a shot or not. I met a lot of people and discovered some great studios that I didn’t even know about, such as Seagulls Fly. This was one of only a few opportunities I had been given to speak with professionals in the industry and to pick their brains.
Another great thing about this competition was that it gave me a reason to work hard, work fast, get some outside opinions, and work on something for my personal demo reel. As a student, the deadlines are a lot quicker paced, and trying to juggle multiple classes and assignments can get tough sometimes. That’s definitely a good way to get the juices flowing, but sometimes you need to give yourself time to animate and hit all those beats and details.
This competition was a great way for a student or recent graduate to get a professional-like experience—and possibly get paid. Even if it’s not the biggest salary, it is still something.
Most animation internships don’t pay anything, so this was a great chance for somebody who needed income to do it in their spare time. This way you get an internship-like experience (though not quite as one-on-one) and still can do your day job.
Experience is experience in my mind, and this experience came with the chance that I could possibly be credited in a film that shows before a major motion picture.
Process
The competition also answered a question I was having about working remotely: I was happy to discover how well it worked. The shot just had to be downloaded and you were ready to go. You follow the simple steps to save and output the video and voila, you’re a competitor. With the pace and deadlines, it was a lot like being a professional, just in a more laid back sort of way.
In the end, I submitted three shots . Out of those three shots, I liked the way two of them turned out. The day finally came and the results came out and I… won. Only one of my shots won, and oddly enough, it was my first shot that I did—the one that I had lost hope for.
I was really excited. I was extremely busy at school and started to get worried about time that I would have to fix the shot and clean it up, when I got another email. This one told me that my shot had been cut from the film, but that I would still be in the credits and I would still receive the money.
The Takeaway
This ended up working out perfectly. I had made friends with people in the industry, worked on a professional project, gotten my name in the credits of a short that would show before a real movie, received $500, improved my skills a lot—and I had gotten a feel for the “real” world.
Did this competition help me get a job? Not directly, but it certainly was a step in the staircase that got me to where I am, an animator at Rhythm and Hues working on a feature film.
Mass Animation was a fun ride in the theme park that is the world of Animation. I don’t know what ride I’ll go on next but who really does? Maybe it will be the next Mass Animation competition, maybe it won’t. All I can say is that I highly, highly recommend this competition or any competitions for people looking to improve and push themselves.
Plaza Films’ Helen Clemens directs a curious odyssey for Eskimo Joe’s “Losing Friends Over Love” music video. The project’s gentle ambiance is shot through with streaks of tension, creating a compelling narrative arc within a claustrophobic world.
Animated by Pete Commins (Partizan), the video’s faux stop-motion feel, electro-mechanical props and use of room-based vignettes remind me a little of the classic Super Furry Animals “It’s Not the End of the World” video (created by David and Laurent Nicolas), but “Losing Friends” has a look-and-feel all its own, driven as it is by the innocent exploration of the lead character.
One can easily say that motion graphics has become one of the most tantalizing careers for the creative minded. The opportunity to make art utilizing design, illustration, animation and sound as mixed medium is an easy sell for any artistic person. Which is why this little industry of ours has drawn some of the best creatives in the world. The only snag, this art form’s foundation is built entirely around advertising. Although the challenge of designing to sell can be a thrill, in the end, the purity of our ideas become diluted by the needs of the client and a myriad of other factors. This hurdle is one a fine artist normally does not have to overcome.
Almost as a reaction to this, festivals and collaborative projects have emerged that give the creatives in this industry an opportunity to take their artistic energy and focus it on their own personal work.
One such independent film series is Twenty120, which invites 20 filmmakers to create two minute films on a given theme.
Here at Motionographer we see a need to embrace independent film collections like Twenty120 that give all of us a venue to channel our creative desires. As a result we are excited to sponsor the NYC premiere of this years Twenty120 films to be shown on August 27th at the Art Directors Club presented by MassMarket and Click 3x.
Also, in this coming week we will be releasing limited free tickets to those who are in the neighborhood and want to come down to see the event, drink some free beer and mingle with the directors. We will also be doing an interview with Connor Swegle and Rich Rama, the two men in charge of Twenty120. Stay tuned for more details on the 3rd annual premiere of Twenty120.
You know how it is. Everything is calm. The pace, relaxed. Maybe you’ll write a little email to your mum, letting her know how special—
BAM! The shit hits the fan. Demands on your creative powers are being made from some shadowy force on high, and you jump into high gear, riding that familiar blend of adrenalin and caffeine that all creative workers know too well.
Favorite moments: the error message during the blender sequence, the post-it note reading “Find money and weapons” and the elegantly executed end-tag.
The sound design, created by Ubisoft, really pushes this to the next level (as all good sound design does), exaggerating the action and creating striking contrasts throughout the project.
Some philosophies of aesthetics enumerate seven primary art forms derived from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s “Lectures on the Aesthetics” and the writings of film theorist Ricciotto Canudo: architecture, sculpture, painting, dance, music, poetry, and cinema.
The order is disputed, and architecture is sometimes shuffled to the third position, as it was by aspiring filmmaker Alex Roman for the title of his breathtaking work in progress, TheThird&TheSeventh, an artful combination of photorealistic architectural renderings and stylish CG cinematography.
In Roman’s able hands, the combination is undeniably poetic. His reverence for light borders on transcendent, and his attention to detail is inspiring. We caught up with Alex for a little background information.
Tell us a little about yourself. Who are you? Where are you from? What do you currently do?
I was born in 1979, in Alacant (Alicante), a city in Spain. I would first like to say that my real name is Jorge Seva, but I use “Alex Roman” as an artistic alias for publishing independent work.
After being trained in traditional painting at a few academies, I discovered this other world called CG. After school, I made the move to Madrid and began working at a visual effects company. That stint did not last too long due to the lack of demand for visual effects in the Spanish market at the time.
It was then that I switched into the VIZ (architectural visualization) business. I have been working for several companies since. After that, I took a sabbatical year for to work on an “already-built work” visualization series, which will be stitched together into a short animated piece.
Were you formally trained in architecture?
Nope, never. But I was very interested in architecture since I was a child. Maybe it’s not too late.
Can you tell us a little about the TheThird&TheSeventh film?
Well, after working in VIZ for years, I realized that there was a huge aesthetic difference between most clients’ commercial demands and photography of already-built structures. The lack of respect for the architecture itself in some “pure” commercial illustration was very frustrating to me. (Well, this is just my opinion, of course.)
Then, I decided to start a personal journey: to experiment with a more cinematographic and/or photographic oriented point of view of some of my favorites architects’ masterpieces.
Hence, the “TheThird&TheSeventh” project…
After thumbing through a book of Frank Lloyd Wright’s sketches once, I chatted with an architect friend of mine about the art of architectural rendering. He told me that sometimes architects intentionally leave sketches vague or messy.
It not only creates wiggle room when it comes to client negotiations, it leaves room for the imagination to paint in details. How would you respond to that idea?
Well, there are of course several purposes behind computer graphics benefits. That “messy” representation style is very useful at a birth-idea/growing-process stages. Also, there are of course many architects that use CG as a sketching oriented tool… why not?
Your sensitivity to light is amazing. How would you describe the interplay between light and architecture?
Thanks! I think architecture is sculpting with light most of the time. There’s neither volume nor colors and materials without light and shadow.
Like Kahn said once: “In the old buildings, the columns were an expression of light. Light, no light, light, no light, light, you see…”
The level of realism in the TheThird&TheSeventh is stunning. Your render times must be incredible. What software and hardware do you use? How long is an average render?
I use 3DS Max and Vray for rendering, Photoshop for texture work, AfterEffects for compositing and color grading and Adobe Premiere for edit it all.
My desktop PC (i7 920) it’s now the only hardware i have. Every frame rendertime may vary from 20 sec to 1:30 hr (720p) It all depends on how complex the scene is.
However, i invested a lot of time in scene optimization for rendering. I think it’s the key for a flexible workflow.
How can we see the full TheThird&TheSeventh film?
I’m finishing the latest shots, fighting with the music—the hardest stage for me—and editing at the moment. We will see it complete around the end of the summer of 2009. I really hope so!
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