Hasta La Motion!

Sorry I’m Late is a short film by Tomas Mankovsky. Be sure to check out the Making of page.

Photo by Victoria Peckham

There’s a lot going over the next month. I’ll try to round up a few of the relevant events here. Stay tuned for a full-fledged calendar feature soon.

May 20th: Forget The Film, Watch The Titles! (Los Angeles)

Coming up this Wednesday the 20th at the Billy Wilder Theater in LA, Flux and Forget The Film, Watch The Titles! have organized a fantastic lineup of title designers: Jamie Caliri of Duck, Danny Yount of Prologue, Karin Fong of Imaginary Forces, Garson Yu of yU+co, and Kyle Cooper of Prologue. Wow.

RSVP for free admission

May & June: Cut & Paste Asia

Cut & Paste is currently on its Asian tour. Hong Kong was last week; coming up are Shanghai (05/23/09), Tokyo (05/30/09) and Sydney (06/06/09). Also make sure to put the Global Championships on June 20th in NYC on your calendar.

Cut & Paste website

May 21st-30th: LOOP (Barcelona)

LOOP is a multi-day event that includes a festival, a fair and a conference within the field of video art. And it takes place in one of my favorite cities, Barcelona. Sounds like a great way to spend a few days.

LOOP site

June 16th-18th: Promax|BDA North America (NYC)

This is a must-attend event for many of you, and this year looks really strong. Confirmed speakers include Robert Redford, Bob Saget, John Maeda and Ralph Steadman, among many others. (Little ol’ me will be doing State of Design on June 17th in Grand Ballroom, if you want to stop by and say hi.)

Full Promax|BDA schedule

June 18-19th: Sonar (Barcelona)

Sonar is “Barcelona’s International Festival of Advanced Music and Multimedia Art” from June 18-19. This year’s lineup is a tour de force of musicians and DJ’s accompanied by visuals and installations from around the world.

Sonar site

Know of more events?

Send ‘em my way! I’m working on a calendar feature for the site, and I’d love to start harvesting stuff now.

Now get out there and mingle!

Posted on Motionographer

“What in the Box?” is the extremely ambitious “test film” created by a Dutch students Tim Smit and Thibaut Niels that’s been heating up YouTube—and now international media—quite a bit in the last few months.

The story is an apocalyptic POV sci-fi thriller that mixes bits of JJ Abrams and Half-Life together to create a thoroughly entertaining 9-minute ride. Tim Smit’s not a filmmaking student, though. He studies physics. VFX is a “hobby.” Despite that, it’s likely that “What’s In the Box?” will take him on a new path he hadn’t quite planed on.

The film’s title is likely a literal take on JJ Abrams’ “Mystery Box” TED talk. The music has been lifted from Lost, and the POV style is strongly reminiscent of Cloverfield (another Abrams project), but instead of seeing these things as negatives, I see them as brilliant remixes of cultural phonemena. (Yes, I’m thinking of Larry Lessig.)

In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Lost’s executive producer Damon Lindelof said:

“The fact that anyone with talent and a video camera — or maybe just the video camera — can tell a chapter of any story, whether it be their own or a continuation of someone else’s, is pretty cool to me. But what’s even cooler is when the fan-generated content becomes indistinguishable from the content generated by the creators themselves. The quality of “What’s in the Box?” is secondary only to its mystery.”

An interview with “What In the Box? creators

(You can toggle English subtitles using the options button in the lower-right corner.)

Related Links

• Official movie site
• Babel Research website
• Entertainment Weekly’s article on the film

Posted on Motionographer

As festival season makes its way around the globe, we are hit with an annual slew of exceptional, experimental (no pun intended) work from some of our most talented shops and individuals.

This time around we’ve got Onesize coming strong with the Sponsor Titles for OFFF Lisbon, 2009. This ambitious, 8 minute piece walks us through a countless number of classic and unexpected 3D type experiments. I encourage you to stick around until the end!

An Eastern-Block archival video vibe sets the mood, while an impressive cameo from Onesize’s own Head of 3D (Harm van Zon) brings narrative and humor to what could have become another piece of derivative shape/type-porn.

Be sure to check out some of behind-the-scenes extras as well.

Posted on Motionographer

Psyop crafted these two grin-worthy fairy tales for the California Milk Processor Board and agency Grupo Gallegos: “Sad Princess” and “Medusa.”

This is a study in the art of narrative compression. Each spot feels like fully realized fairy tale—and yet nothing is rushed. From the lush mattes to the tiny dancing mouse at the end of “Sad Princess,” each frame feels like a pitch board packed with detail.

Psyop apparently had some serious creative leverage in how exactly to illustrate Gallegos’ scripts. Says Creative Director Marco Spier:

We had a lot of fun coming up with the possibilities of her wrath. And thinking about how to transition from her tender little tear drop-into wreaking havoc on the town’s men, before turning into a tumultuous ocean, in a legendary storm, all in 2.3 seconds.

One technical note: Scrub through the snakes-to-hair transformation at the end of “Medusa.” While a cross-disolve might have done the trick, the snakes are actually morphing into hair. Despite not registering on a conscious level, labor-intesive details like that are what separate Psyop from the herd.

Watch “Sad Princess” and “Medusa”

Posted on Motionographer