Hasta La Motion!

Charlex has recently created Shape Shifter, a larger-than-life film that’s been attracting remarkable attention online since its release. From the pieces of an exploded car, a constantly-transforming creature is born, while a fantastic environment unfolds under its feet. It’s a piece full of fluid transitions and finely-tuned visuals, directed by Alex Weil, who kindly shared some insights with Motionographer (full interview here).

“Because it begins with a series of shots of a car at night, the piece is clearly set up like a car commercial, but the film itself breaks down in a stream of conscious fashion and turns into a dream where it becomes unclear what is subject and what is object. As if in a dream, scenarios change suddenly and fluidly; the setting and characters go back and forth between a state of order and one of chaos.”

Visually, it is flawless, with its outstanding transformations and realistic organic animations. Then, there’s the whispered narration by Gabriel Byrne and subtle sound design that combine for the dreamy effect. However, what makes Shape Shifter even more solid is it’s core idea, as explains Diana Park, designer and co-director of the film:

“My initial concept was based around the idea of genesis — the birth and evolution of life. I also wanted to play with the idea of reversing the role of the machine as a creator rather than creation. These concepts led to my first draft and treatment involving a car driving in middle of the night which then enters into a dream like state. As the real world fades away and reality shifts, the car fragments into meteors that take us into a new world where nothing exists. As the meteorites land they trigger life and create a multitude of fauna and flora. The world begins to form and we follow the story of predator and prey in a heated chase that then shifts from land to sea as we watch a school of fish continue the journey. The story then culminates in a fantastic leap through the surface as the creatures transform into flight and take us off into the sunset of a new world.”

The directors stressed that during the completion of the film a lot of space was given for creative input from the whole team (up to 15 artists), in an example of “an extremely collaborative effort”, as Alex says. “The project was a work of love from everyone”, adds Diana. The result can be seen in every frame.

Full interview with Alex Weil and list of Credits

Posted on Motionographer

MK12 has just released another in-house project, a short film called TELEPHONEME. It brings the idea of “language working as a double-agent, carrying a hidden meaning with it for reasons yet-unknown” (there’s a PDF with more details in the cool site!).

The movie expertly combines live action with animation in the collective’s unique style, with neatly composited shapes and type, aged-film textures, and a beautiful nostalgic color palette. TELEPHONEME synthesizes a lot of MK12′s aesthetic, which will definitely keep on inspiring crowds of Motion Designers throughout the world.

MK12′s co-founder Ben Radatz kindly shared some insights about the project:

TELEPHONEME came about after we’d begun writing a short about how the alphabet was actually a “trojan horse” with coded messages and symbols, designed by a shadow group intent on keeping the rest of us down. While writing the piece we came across a Bell Labs-funded educational film called “The Alphabet Conspiracy,” which had pretty much the same content we were writing into our version. So we instead appropriated the voiceover and re-mixed it into a slightly darker version of itself. The voice is that of Frank Baxter, aka Dr. Research, a well-known figure in the educational film world. And, he tweets! We developed a typeface called “Chadwick” which we envisioned as a “root font” of sorts – a theoretically perfect and balanced font that concerned itself more with technical execution than visual aesthetics. This was the font that we used throughout the piece, and we set up a pretty rigid set of guidelines for it’s use. It’s not something that’s likely to be picked up on, but it made a good foundation for the rest of the piece. While voiceover is borrowed from the original film, the sound design was done in-house, borrowing from analog sources and mixing them into a very sight-for-see composition.

Posted on Motionographer