Hasta La Motion!

555 KUBIK | facade projection | from urbanscreen

The perfect implementation of a projection onto the facade of a building.

Here are the nominees for a 2009 Emmy award in Outstanding Main Title Design.

True Blood (HBO)

Rama Allen, Designer; Shawn Fedorchuk, Editor; Matthew Mulder, Creative Director; Morgan Henry, Main Title Producer; Camm Rowland, Designer; Ryan Gagnier, Designer
Making of and case study on Digital Kitchen’s site

Taking Chance (HBO)

Michael Riley, Title Designer; Dru Nget, Title Designer; Dan Meehan, Animator; Bob Swensen, Main Title Producer

United States Of Tara (Showtime)

Jamie Caliri, Director/Director of Photography/Editor/Main Digital Compositor; Dave Finkel, Creator; Brett Baer, Creator
Q&A with Jamie Caliri on The Art of the Title Sequence

Storymakers (AMC)

James Spindler, Creative Director; Mike Wasilewski, Designer; Ahmet Ahmet, Art Director; Grant Lau, Art Director
Interview with the creators on AMC’s blog

Lie To Me (FOX) – Video not available

Robert Bradley, Title Designer; Thomas Cobb, Title Designer
You can watch full episodes of Lie to Me on Hulu.com (in the United States).

See the official Emmy site for more details.

Posted on Motionographer

For those of you who attended F5 last April, you know that our speakers were a diverse and inspiring mix of creative people from a wide spectrum of fields. As promised, we’re sharing those talks with the world, starting with Simon Robson and Tim Rayner’s presentation about their collaborative project, The Coalition of the Willing.

Although Simon and Tim weren’t the first speakers of our two-day event, we’re sharing their talk first for two reasons. 1) We believe in their cause, and 2) They need your support.

I asked Simon to tell us about his experience of F5:

Talking at F5 was a real pleasure. It gave Tim and I the chance to introduce the project we are currently developing, entitled ‘Coalition of The Willing’. It also gave us a deadline for which to prepare enough material to give the audience a good idea of what the project is all about. In short, F5 gave us a shot in the arm.

I won’t go too much into what ‘Coalition’ is about here, Tim does a fantastic job in the presentation of distilling the thinking and ideas behind the project. Suffice it to say that it’s a film that suggests a collaborative, technological way of combating climate change.

The film is also being made in a collaborative way. In the presentation, I talk about artists who became involved prior to F5. Since F5, Loyalkaspar, Parasol Island and World Leaders have all begun creating sections for the film. I’m thrilled and excited by the good will and the caliber of the artists who’ve thrown themselves into this project.

We plan to give the film a staggered online release, starting by publishing the written argument online and then fleshing this out with shots as and when they are completed. It’s an idea that Tim and I have been developing with Chris O’Reilly from Nexus Productions.

We hope that people will engage with the argument and then respond to the way ideas are visualised as the shots are published. It’s all about keeping the argument current and alive. To this end, we will be making the film the ‘core’ of a site that will evolve as people post comment and invited writers post articles on issues that branch off from topics introduced in the film.

We’ve been inspired by online data visualisation by artists like Manuel Lima, and we’re currently looking for an online partner to help us develop our online aspirations for this project.

So finally I’ll just echo the last thing I said at F5: If you’re a great moving-image maker or a creative interaction designer and you’d like to get involved with Coalition of The Willing, then please get in touch with me at simon@knife-party.net.

I hope you enjoy the talk.

Posted on Motionographer

Photo by Kevin Utting, www.flickr.com/photos/tallkev/

When Mass Animation announced their goal of creating a CG short film by “crowd-sourcing” the animation to a global community of thousands of animators, I had two initial reactions:

1) They’ll never pull it off, and 2) They shouldn’t pull it off.

Last Wednesday, the New York Times proved me wrong on the first count. Mass Animation’s five-minute short, “Live Music,” (trailer) will open for TriStar Pictures’ feature-length animated film “Planet 51″ on November 20th.

But my second charge—the ethical one—is still in tact.

How’d They Do It?

Through Facebook, Mass Animation distributed the story, soundtrack and 3D assets (created by Dallas-based Reel FX) for “Live Music” and asked animators to submit scenes, which were then voted on by a jury for inclusion in the film.

Mass Animation received thousands of submissions from around the globe, but only 51 made the final cut. According to the Times, each of the animators will receive on-screen credit and $500 for their efforts.

Why Mass Animation Won’t Work

Despite the seemingly earnest intentions of its creators, “Live Music” will ultimately be remembered as a brilliantly orchestrated publicity stunt. Right now, the spotlight is shining on Mass Animation and its corporate backers—which include Intel, Dell, Autodesk and others—largely because of the novelty of the Mass Animation production model and the fact that it gives them all a reason to toss around buzzwords like “social networking,” “crowd-sourcing” and “open-source.” A second short film produced in the same way would garner much less attention.

Mass Animation, of course, understands that. And so they’ve set their sights on creating a feature-length film. Feature films, though, require much larger budgets than the paltry $1 million drummed up for “Live Music.” And with larger budgets come expectations of a concrete return on investment—not just good PR.

Feature films also demand complex story lines, nuanced character development and the ability to work and re-work scenes dozens of times over. The Mass Animation model is essentially a gigantic net thrown wide across the ocean of the web. It pulls up a dazzling array of beautiful fish, but when you need a very specific fish for a very specific purpose, you’re out of luck.

Of course, you could hire experienced animators who’ve spent years perfecting their craft, but then you’d be straying from the “democratization of animation” that Mass Animation embraces. (Apparently, traditional animation is an oppressive regime of the elite?)

The Future of Spec Work

From the perspective of the animators, this is the menace of spec work writ large. Spec work is “any requested work for which a fair and reasonable fee has not been agreed upon, preferably in writing.” (Source: No!Spec).

In the case of “Live Music,” only 51 animators made the cut with just $500 awarded to each of them. While it’s probably rewarding for them to see their name in the film’s credits, that’s hardly enough money to live on. Mass Animation doesn’t need to pay them more, though. There are thousands of other animators waiting in line to do it for the same amount—perhaps even for free.

And that hurts all animators. The fundamental problem with the widespread creation of spec work is that it undermines the economic incentives driving competition in the creative workforce. In the short term, it seems like a win-win for everyone involved. Played out to its logical conclusion, however, a spec model of feature-film creation sacrifices quality for quantity.

It also relegates animators to mere cogs in a machine. There’s no real dialogue between director and animator, there’s only a mandate for more.

One More Turn of the Screw

I find it interesting that the filmmakers decided to farm out only the animation portion of the filmmaking process. Were this truly an open, democratic approach to filmmaking, wouldn’t all aspects of the film be crowd-sourced? The script, character design, voiceover, lighting—all the hundreds of roles it takes to successfully create an animated movie—would have been created by thousands of participants, right?

No, that obviously wouldn’t have worked. That would have been Mess Animation.

To executives, though, character animation is the most mechanical part of the process, the most easily produced. After all, animation has long been outsourced to India and China. Perhaps there’s a way to do it for even cheaper.

As long as animators are willing to toss themselves into the ring for $500 a try, it would appear so. The promise of being a “Hollywood animator” is still too great for many to pass up. As one commenter on Mass Animation’s Facebook page wrote, “Awesome idea of working with independents. I hope it catches on.”

Make no mistake: These aren’t “independents” that Mass Animation is working with; these are lowest-bidders. To be sure, some are professionals with spare time on their hands, but none of them could sustain themselves on projects like these. (Mass Animation, however, is going to be just fine.)

The (Rotten?) Carrot on the Stick

One popular rebuttal to all this is that while the winning participants in “Live Music” may not have been paid much money, their involvement in this project will open up doors for them. It’s their big break, in other words.

This idea is predicated on the notion that the traditional model of production will remain the dominant form, while ventures like Mass Animation will simply function as talent scouts. If that’s true, it severely limits the “democractic” model. If all film production were crowd-sourced, there’d be no such thing as a “big break.” There’d be no reward of making it to the big time, just more $500 gigs that you may or may not win.

What Do You Think?

I don’t mean to paint Mass Animation as a bunch of bad guys. I really think they believe in what they’re doing; but I also think the basic model raises some serious issues and may do some lasting harm.

What’s your take on all this? Are you a no-spec purist? Or do you agree with Mass Animation that this is the dawning of a new age of distributed creativity?

For those attending SIGGRAPH in New Orleans, you might want to check our the Mass Animation panel. More info here.

Feeling feisty? Join the ANTI-Mass Animation Facebook Group.

Posted on Motionographer

Swedish Animation Studio Fido flexes their muscles to animate this story about building the sustainable future for RWE. Together with German agency Jung von Matt, they developed the main character and and the story of being big and proud of it.

“The challenge was to create a character that is not a creature that people fear nor a human being” says Jens Pfau from JVM. The biggest challenges in the four-month production time were the facial expessions, skin and hair of the character and to define that “special edge that makes the world magical.”

Originally conceived as an in-house corporate video, the clip will premier in German cinemas to mark the launch of the new Harry Potter film. “If people like him, he might have a long future, doing some good deeds.”

(Here’s the video in english language.)

Posted on Motionographer