After being offline while it made the festival cirtcuit and drummed up enough support to get nominated for an Academy Award, the wonderful “Okatpodi” is back online. Check it out here.
Don’t miss the making-of goodies on the official site. Our original Motionographer post can be found here.
Posted on Motionographer
The Onitsuka Tiger is back to celebrate it’s 60th anniversary, a milestone of major significance to Japanese culture that is laden with symbolism around the “Cycle of Life”. As a result, Amsterdam Worldwide has created a campaign to celebrate the Zodiac Legend of the race of the sacred animals to secure spots on the Zodiac calendar.
Tapped for the Zodiac Race was New York studio, PandaPanther, who once again prove that they are the class of the character design/animation studios. Setting their animation around the hand built Zodiac Race sneaker diorama (that will be on tour in Europe, Asia, Australasia and the USA in selected trade and fashion shows), PP seamlessly mix their trademark cg characters with the environment and polish it off with touches of cel animation. Not to be forgotten is the audio mix that successfully brings all these characters to life and gives just the right touch of odd to make it all work.
Make sure to watch this making of video to see how the shoe was planned, built and worked from for this animation.
Directors cut: here
Client:
Onitsuka Tiger
Creative Agency:
Amsterdam Worldwide
Executive Creative Director:
Richard Gorodecky
Creative Director:
Andrew Watson
Copy Writer:
Gillian Glendinning
Art Director:
Jasper Mittelmeijer
Planner (creative agency):
Simon Neate-Stidson
Senior producer (creative agency):
Samantha Koch
Production Company:
Panda Panther
Directors:
Jonathan Garin & Naomi Nishimura
Executive Producer:
Senju Hudson
Producers:
Sarah Obermeier
Lydia Holness
Coordinator:
Natsu Takahashi
Storyboard Artist:
David Zung
Designers:
Naomi Nishimura
Jonathan Garin
Ari Hwang
Elisa Riera Ruiz
3D Animators:
Han Hu
Miles Southan
Michael Galbraith
Jeff Kim
Jonathan Garin
3D Artists:
Stanley Llin
Ari Hwang
Compositing:
Naomi Nishimura
Matt St. Leger
Jonathan Garin
2d Animation & Fx:
Matt St. Leger
Jonathan Garin
Ari Hwang
Cell Animation:
Studio: Xebec, Tokyo
Nobuyoshi Habara
Meiju Maeda
Junki Honma
Props and art department:
Junko Shimizu
Naomi Nishimura
Production Intern:
Arwita Adinegoro
Sound Design:
Norman Bambi
DP:
Carolyn Taylor
Lighting Assistant:
Juliana Vail
Technical Shoot Supervisor/Rig Operator
Richard Coppola
Making of Video Editing:
Robert Lopuski
In-store Display Fabrication
Studio: Brooklyn Model Works
John Kuntzsch- principal
Jonathan Bozak- project manager
Grant Guilliams
Chris Baker
Adam Baily
Jen Poueymirou
Mike Sukys
Daniel Harper
Marty Chafkin and the crew at Perfection Electricks
Posted on Motionographer
Dougal Wilson, who has spent the last few years solidifying himself as one of London’s most interesting directors, recently released this video for Coldplay’s Life In Technicolor II. I know the puppet thing has been done a few times recently and pretty well to boot (once by Dougal in fact). But, he has unsurprisingly brought his trademark charm to yet another one. Based on the traditional English puppet show Punch & Judy, puppet versions of Coldplay break the fourth wall and fill the room with pure arena rock.
Credits
Coldplay
Life In Technicolour II (EMI)
Production Co: Colonel Blimp
Director: Dougal Wilson
Producer: Matthew Fone
Director Of Photography: Brett Turnbull
Art director: Andy Kelly
Master Puppet maker: Nonny Beakes
Stylists: Michelle May, Natalie Marie Willis, Holly Dench
SFX : Artem
Editor: Joe Guest at Final Cut
Telecine: Jean Clement-Soret at MPC
Online: Tom Harding & Stirling Archibald at MPC
Commissioner: Kirstin Cruickshank
Posted on Motionographer
Super Quickie: My favorite spot from all the Super Bowl shenanigans was this gem starring Alec Baldwin, dreamed up by Crispin Porter + Bogusky for Hulu. Method’s visual effects work got the job done, but the writing and editing steal the show.
Credits
Client: Hulu
Agency: Crispin Porter + Bogusky
Creative Director: Andrew Keller
Agency Producer: Chad Hoppenwasser
Art Director: DJ Pierce
Copywriter: Justin Ebert
Production Company: Pony Show Entertainment
Director: Peter Berg
Executive Producer: Susan Kirson,
Jeffrey Frankel
Director of Photography: Tobias Schliessler
Producer: Fern Martin
Editorial Company: Mackenzie Cutler
Editor: Ian Mackenzie
Post Production: Company3
Colorist: Billy Gabor
Post Producer: Marie de Leon
VFX: Method
CG Artist: Andy Lesniak,
Bryant Reif,
Tom MacDougall,
Steve Toccaceli
Lead Compositor: Wensen Ho
Flame Compositor: Andy Davis,
David Hernandez,
Claus Hansen,
Pierre LaQuerre,
Satoshi Ozeki,
Joey Bratesani
Desktop Compositor: Robert Tatum,
Chris Hunsberger,
Jay Robinson
VFX Producer: Cara Farnsworth
VFX Executive Producer: Robert Owens
Set Supervisor: David Jones
Posted on Motionographer
Oscar-nominated directing duo Smith & Foulkes (Nexus Productions) put their powers to use for Coca Cola and Weiden+Kennedy Portland in an endearing Super Bowl spot entitled “Avatars.”
Playing with the idea that most of us live double lives—one digital, one physical—the :60 project features oodles of alter-egos designed and brought to life by Smith & Foulkes.
Smith & Foulkes explain their approach:
The challenge for us was to film the live action in a documentary style, incidentally observing moments of human behaviour, and then animating the Avatars into the footage in a very naturalistic way. It wasn’t about crazy 3d characters running amok, more about the everyday human behaviour of idly sitting around in parks and coffee shops.
We initially shot the footage on very long lenses to give the sense of the observational camera, before starting the huge technical challenge of believably replacing humans with Avatars in each shot.
I especially like the care S&F showed in creating the digital counterparts for each person. It’s as if they crawled inside the brain of each character to discover what idealized image of themselves would manifest itself in digital space.
Obviously there was a lot of fun to be had in casting each Avatar for each human, showing how people might select their online identity. Some would be a complete fantasy, while others a slightly more exciting version of their real selves.
The track is “Stranger in the Crowd” performed by Cee-Lo Green of Gnarls Barkley (and originally made famous by Elvis Preseley).
Posted on Motionographer
So, due to popular demand, I’m pleased to re-present (as a full post) the title sequence to ‘Capitu’–a TV miniseries, based on a 19th century Brazilian literary masterpiece, Dom Casmurro, written by Machado de Assis. Told retrospectively from the point of view of the aging central character, it describes his obession with finding all kinds of evidence that his wife had been unfaithful, and his own best friend is actually the father of their only son.
What struck me is the amount of research, meaning, and integrity that goes behind this. Since the book is considered a ‘forerunner of Modernism (at least in Brazil)‘, the team’s initial inspiration is Dadaism, specifically the decollage technique (creating an image by cutting, tearing or otherwise removing pieces of a picture to reveal parts of other images lying beneath).
According to Lobo, ‘the chaotic and disjointed nature’ of Dada decollage pieces parallels the nonlinear, short-chaptered structure of the novel. Layering of images suggests the passage of time, memory, and accumulated life experience, and the tearing/ripping evokes the violence inherent in the central character’s tormenting doubts and desire for vengeance.
The animation was first created in After Effects, then each frame was printed on different paper stock. The printed frames were crumpled, restretched out and glued one on top of the other, and the entire stack was then placed under a stop-motion camera. Shots were taken at appropriate intervals as the layers were ripped and peeled. The photographs were taken back into after effects to create the final stop-motion sequence.
Lobo has been kind enough to provide us with the ‘making of’ video and a very eloquent write-up about the conceptual and aesthetic rationale behind it. Click on the link below to read it all…highly recommended.
In 2008, Lobo was commissioned to create the opening sequence and interstitials for Capitu, a TV mini-series adaptation of Dom Casmurro, the masterpiece by 19th-century Brazilian novelist Machado de Assis. The story is narrated by the title character, an aging man who decides to write his memoirs in an attempt to “tie the two ends of life together”. But the true purpose of his endeavor is to search for proof justifying his undying obsession: that his childhood sweetheart, Capitu, whom he finally succeeded in marrying, had betrayed him with his best friend, the real father of their only son. What makes Machado’s novel unconventional is that he treats the traditional themes of marriage and adultery as a mere backdrop for an exploration of surprisingly modern literary concerns: the unreliability of the first-person narrator; a skeptical awareness of the novel’s structure; the failure of memory in recapturing past facts objectively, functioning instead as a means for self-justification and self-deceit.
Lobo sought to encapsulate these issues in the opening sequence, not just through the choice of imagery but also in a way that involved the animation technique itself. The preliminary research started with the early 20th-century art movement Dada, following a suggestion by the series’ director Luiz Fernando Carvalho. Since Dom Casmurro is considered a forerunner of Modernism, at least in Brazil, we thought it made sense to start with some of the most radical pioneers of the avant-garde. We focused mainly on Dada artists who used collage and photomontage as their media of choice. The chaotic and disjointed nature of their work paralleled the fragmented structure of Machado’s novel, with its short chapters, nonlinearity and constant interruptions as well as remarks by the narrator himself. This research on the evolution of collage eventually led us to discover the works of post-Dada European artists like Wolf Vostell, Mimmo Rotella and Jacques Villeglé. They developed what became known as decollage: instead of building up an image by adding parts of other images, they worked by cutting, tearing or otherwise removing pieces of a picture to reveal parts of other images lying beneath.
This approach seemed perfect for the task at hand. The superposition of images provided a fitting metaphor for the passage of time and the accumulation of experiences throughout one’s life. Ripping through these levels mirrored the process of peeling the layers of memory carried out by the narrator, in search for the final truth buried in his past. The act of ripping also suggests violence, representative of his tormenting doubt and desire for vengeance.
Visually, the distressed result of this procedure was also appropriate, since it connected in many ways with the art direction of the mini-series. The show was predominantly shot inside a run-down mansion, using recycled materials for settings and props. The theater and the opera are recurring elements in the novel, so the production relied on classic theatrical techniques for the recreation of the environments. This inspired us to base our layouts on old letterpress show posters – the same material largely employed by the decollage artists.
We wanted the aesthetic and the animation technique to be fully integrated in these pieces, which meant that the ripped paper should be more than just a graphic style: it should be the very mechanism that drove the animation forward. We started by preparing simple animations in After Effects, primarily featuring typography and collage-like graphics representing key concepts of the story. These animations were edited together with short live-action clips from the series, and the entire sequence was then printed sequentially, frame by frame, on different kinds of paper. These sheets were glued on top of each other, resulting in a stack of paper that had the first frame of the opening at the top and the last frame at the bottom. We mounted the stack below a table-top digital camera and proceeded to rip and tear the paper sheets one by one, slowly revealing each layer underneath. This process was photographed at regular intervals, and the pictures were imported back into After Effects as a sequence, where it received some slight color and time adjustments.
The result was the same animation and live-action sequence we started with, only fractured and reassembled in such a way that never allows for a single intact frame. Every image that begins to take shape never achieves its complete form; every ripped bit of paper reveals something that belongs to another point in time. The spot resolves itself only at the end, unveiling the word Capitu: the only person who holds the key to the mystery of the story.
Posted on Motionographer
The Japanese did it again!
Been a while since I watched a music video that ticks all the right boxes. Is well-paced, not draggy. Has delightful, visual transitions. Accompanies a great song. Puts a smile on my face, making a drab workday afternoon much more bearable.
This video for the new single ‘Mind Wall’ by DJ Towa Tei (feat. Miho Hatori) did all these and more. Refreshingly kooky, with a marker-pen like texture that reminds me of those brilliant 80s/90s Japanese stationery graphics and adolescent scribbles, it’s such a visual treat. Exuberant and clever, almost effortlessly.
From what I could decipher, thanks to Google Translate, it was directed by Takeshi Nakamura for the Japanese production company ‘Caviar,’ illustrated by Hiroshi Hisashi and Yuko Yasunaga from Nicographics.
This article at White-Screen.jp outlines the production process, and some background info on Nicographics. I find it interesting that the illustrations are done using Cintiq 21 UX,, and it seems that the project’s workflow is quite different to that of a western studio.
The automatic translation is rather confusing, however. So if any of you is fluent in Japanese, do help us out with deciphering the info!
Thanks to Graham Cross for the tip! Oh, and don’t forget to click ‘watch in high quality’ option.
Posted on Motionographer
I know this piece has been up for close to a week now. However, after some great feedback across the board, I’ve decided to upgrade to a full-post.
If you haven’t already, check out Yuval and Merav Nathan’s video for Oren Lavie’s song, Her Morning Elegance. This delicately choreographed film is a perfect example of how stop-motion can continue to be a fresh technique when backed by a strong narrative, thoughtful details and a bit of personal flare. Also take notice of this piece’s relatively one-shot approach and beautifully executed animation; a by product of pre-vis using 3d dummies during pre-production.
Credits
Directors: Yuval & Merav Nathan, Oren Lavie
Producer: Michal Dayan
Photography: Eyal Landesman
Animation: Yuval Nathan
Assistant Animators: Guy Ben Shitrit, Tamar Nathan
Actress: Shir Shomron
Posted on Motionographer
For this weekend’s Super Bowl ad-o-rama, Psyop and Weiden+Kennedy Portland teamed up create another epic tale of longing for Coke.
Like the 2007 “Happiness Factory,” created for W+K Amsterdam, “Heist” stars inventive little critters, but this time they’re modeled after Mother Nature’s designs. Psyop did a brilliant job walking the fine line between realism and anthropomorphic cuteness.
A Q&A with Psyop’s Todd Mueller and Kylie Matulick will be here soon. Credits here.
Posted on Motionographer
Fresh from Oink digital, Madrid. Tomás Peña directed this show opener for La Hora de Jose Mota. With a crew of 6 people and only 6 weeks (and a miniscule budget to match), they achieved quite a feat!
Credits
Director: Tomás Peña
Client: Hill Valley
Production Company: Oink Digital
Executive Producer: Alvaro Isasi
Art Direction: Tomás Peña, Paulo Mosca
Animation Direction: Jose Antonio Cerro
Technical Direction: Carlos Diéguez
Design y Concept Art: Paulo Mosca
Modeling: Carlos Diéguez, Gerardo del Hierro
Rigging: Carlos Diéguez
Textures: Gerardo del Hierro, Carlos Diéguez, Tomás Peña
Ilumination, Shading: Carlos Diéguez, Gerardo del Hierro
Composition: Tomás Peña, Daniel Kei Kaneda, Gerardo del Hierro
Color Correction: El Colorado
Soundtrack: Enrique Borrajeros
Posted on Motionographer
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.
