Director/Animator Nicolas Ménard brings us his new film: Somewhere.
With a unique style combined with the amazing music/sound design by Rich Vreeland, Somewhere takes us to a completely fresh universe of animation and storytelling.
If you’ve got a month-long tour of events spanning from Berlin to Toronto, from Melbourne to Detroit, how do you visually convey the magnitude of the event? How about hiring a whole team of artists to collaborate on a mixed-media hommage that moves from city to city, hopping from style to style, to reflect the range of locations and music they’re celebrating, while Sammy Bananas seamlessly provides the soundtrack?
For the 2011 Red Bull Music Academy World Tour, Mother New York and Passion Pictures created a short tribute for each of the 10 cities. Led by Pete Candeland, the talented team of directors blended 2D, 3D, stop-motion, photography, illustration and CG. I’m most impressed with the many co-directors and art directors that got credited and the creative freedom to run with their respective sections.
An interesting model for sure, and it sounds like they had a lot of fun as well. Read on for some insight into the process.
Wake up. It’s Friday. The weekend is so near you can smell it. Granted, it smells like beer and cigarettes, but you still need it. More importantly, you need music to go with your beer and cigarettes. And that’s where we come in.
We are pleased to release another exclusive mix of music for your pre-weekend pleasure, this time curated and shaped by the wizards at London-based Radium Audio. In their words:
Our focus is crafting the music and sounds around a “snap shot.” Imagine opening your window in East London—this is what you would hear… from people’s cars, flats and headphones. It’s not definitive… just a slice… enjoy… the Dalston Ponys Nov 2010.
Strap on your phones and imagine a gin and tonic just within reach.
Radium Audio Mix Nov 10 Motionographer Exclusive by Radium-Audio
Image by massdistraction
Dougal Wilson’s latest spot for John Lewis (produced by Blink with VFX from MPC) flexes both his stronger and often contrasting skills; “in-camera” trickery whilst maintaining even pressure on the viewers’ heart strings.
The ambitious camera-move in this spot is an evolution of some of Dougal’s older work in the same vein (see Jarvis Cocker – “Don’t Let Him Waste Your Time” and Boots – “Bus Journey”) . While most folks get wrapped up in the technical aspect of such a project, Dougal continues to focus on the nuances of performance and warmth in cinematography that make this piece his own.
This is yet another prime example of the importance of a singular vision in an industry that can risk being diluted by technique-driven work and the sacrificed narrative that can come as a result.
Agency: Adam & Eve, London
Creative Director: Ben Priest
Copywriters: Ben Tollett, Emer Stamp, Steve Wioland, Matt Woolner
Art Directors: Ben Tollett, Emer Stamp, Steve Wioland, Matt Woolner
Agency Producer: Leila Bartlam
Production Company: Blink, London
Director: Dougal Wilson
Executive Producer: James Bland
Producer: Matt Fone
DP: Dan Landin
Offline Editor: Joe Guest @ Final Cut
Post-Production: MPC Producer: Louisa Cartwright
TK: Jean-Clement Soret
Flame: Dan Adams, Tom Harding, Byron Woodfinden
Shake: Olivier Jezequel
Sound Studio/Engineer: James Saunders @ Jungle
News of a Motion Design studio launch are always exciting, more so when the studio has already possessed a considerable repertoire and strong reputation in Graphic Design.
Originally a Graphic Design / Illustration studio with a clientele ranging from Pepsi to Microsoft and Sony, ilovedust had been flirting with Motion Design for a while, but it wasn’t until recently that they finally decided to launch a Motion department.
With four new projects for clients such as Nike and Mtv , ilovedust showcases their range of styles and technique, from traditional animation to 3D, as well as some great storytelling skills, particularly in the “Nike Chase” project – done in collaboration with Curious Pictures and Director Ro Rao.
We were fortunate enough to get a first glance at the new ilovedust site – which launches today, by the way – and catch up with CD Ingi Erlingsson for an exclusive and very interesting interview.
Make sure to spend some time on their new site and check out the work, motion or static, bombastic stuff!
Looks like they are here to stay. Welcome!
See No Evil, the London event that is run by Thiago Maia and our own James Wignall will celebrate its 1 year anniversary next week with a meeting featuring Ubik and Man vs. Machine. The meeting is at 7PM Tuesday, April 13th at Kick Bar. One lucky attendee will win a brand-new copy of Adobe CS5 as well!
We’re very excited to see more community events like See No Evil that are celebrating and sharing great work in the field of Motion Design, film-making and animation, and that create a space for designers to meet up with each other outside the office. We caught up with Thiago to talk briefly about his last year running the event.
Give us a quick rundown of what See No Evil does, who’s involved and what’s your mission?
See No Evil is an bi-month event and a blog for all Animators, Designers and Directors to show and discuss our work in the UK. It is an initiative from Thiago Maia and James Wignall and our mission is to give the industry a better sense of community in London and a new place where they can find work and interesting things about our industry in UK.
Why did you want to start SNE? What was missing from the Motion Design scene in London?
As a Brazilian and a freelancer in London, I always missed that community side to meet people and especially where to look for it.
In London things are a bit more underground, a bit more difficult to get in touch with if you don’t know people. There are people from everywhere in the world and there are always people arriving and leaving the city. So, I decided to do something to help everyone and make people get together.
In the begin it was just a get together in the Pub and I used to call it “Mograph Meeting”. It used to happen once a month and I used to email just people that I knew and their friends. James Wignall came down few times and we started to talk about the “Mograph Meeting”. He said he was interested in helping me to develop the idea, so we teamed up and in March of 2009 we created the first See No Evil with the release of PSST! Pass It On 3 in London.
What has been the best thing about the last year of SNE?
The best thing of 2009 was to see the event growing, getting better and helping people in the industry.
It started just showing peoples work and now we have the best Directors in UK coming down to show and talk about their work.
What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned? Anything you would have done differently?
I think the big lesson is that it is really difficult to organise something like this, especially without any sponsor or help from the industry. We learnt a lot from our mistakes and we still learning. But it is worth it when you get feedback from people and see that you are helping the industry. It is great for us when we heard people saying that they got work because of See No Evil.
What plans do you have for the next year of SNE?
Our plan is to make the event grow and to be self-sufficient. To make it better and more professional for everyone, with more and more surprises.
We want to improve the website/blog to post more of the best work from the UK industry, and also to make it a better place to find work, studios and freelancers in UK, helping the industry to get together.
If we can dream high, we would love to make a big See No Evil Event next year with Directors and people from around the world. But it still a dream, because at the moment the cost of organising the events comes from our own pockets and a big event would cost a lot money! But we are dreamers and I believe that everything is possible.
Congrats, guys! Looking forward to another year. We’ll try to get over there at some point to check it out and buy a round!
UPDATE: 04/14/10 Check out SNE pics from the event here.
UPDATE: 2 more items are added to the Q&A section, the result of a few readers’ additional query which I followed up with Sam.
Sorry for the delay, folks. Everyone at HQ graciously waited for me to post this one, since I’m such a kitty-freak. So without further ado, I present, the Kitteh Kitteh series, made by the stupendously awesome London-based Tokyoplastic. It’s an insight into what happens in a kitten’s headspace, during those innocent kitten-naps.
There are two in the series, ‘Catzilla‘ and ‘Tail Gunner’, and don’t miss a ‘quick’ video they did to pay tribute to Scatman John and to promote www.kittehkitteh.com. Also available on Vimeo, here.
Those of you who want more, and who are as curious as I was as to how did this delightful project come about, read my interview with Sam from Tokyoplastic, below.
1. How did you guys get the idea for Kitteh Kitteh? Tell us a bit on how the project started…including why you decided to shun the commercial world and hunker down to do this for six months.
We designed and modeled the Kitteh while we were doing the Little Fella a few years ago with a vague idea that we’d use it for some kind of micro series along with the Little Fella. Its so easy to start personal projects, its infinitely harder to finish them and sometimes I think the most terrifying thing about doing ones own work is being faced with a blank canvas; the potential and the freedom can be quite confounding. I think that by placing or by having constraints placed upon your work it forces you to be a lot more creative.
So the Kitteh just sat there along with all the other little projects that we’ve never finished, slowly gathering dust, while the quality of commercial scripts and the budgets to produce them gradually slumped to an all time low. We want to be involved in creative, exciting and challenging projects that fully exploit our talent as directors and enable us to grow (as I am sure all directors do) and given the absence of those we decided it was high time we went back to working on our own stuff.
We knew that we wanted to make entertaining shorts in which we could do a lot of the things we enjoy; character driven animations that combine the cute, grotesque, monstrous and maniacal, that make people laugh and would enable us to do a whole bunch of stuff we’ve never tried. We came up with a list of constraints: they had to be short (which costs less and you can do them quickly… allegedly), have only one character (so far) and they would all be film genre pastiches. Since then we’ve been turning down a lot of work, it feels like a big risk, but then at the same time I look forward to coming into the studio, I have a spring in my step and we’re having fun.
2. I noticed the Scatman tribute is not yet up on the Kitteh Kitteh site…was that a separate piece that was completed after the first 2 videos (Catzilla and Tail Gunner)?
The Scatman John tribute was a little additional thing that we did with the character; it doesn’t really fit in with the concept of the Mini Epic film pastiches which forms the basis of the Kitteh Kitteh series. It is relatively easy to produce something like that so it was released more as a promotional piece for the site and series.
3. How many people worked on this? can you give us a complete crew breakdown?
Since the project goes a long way back a lot of people have worked on it over the last few years. So here’s a brief and probably not exhaustive list:
Direction / sound – tokyoplastic
Kitty Design – Damian Johnson
Kitty Modeling – Matthias Bjurstrom
Rigging – Rodi Kaya
Fur Texture – James Kirkham
Animation – Ben Crowe, Anders Freij
Rendering / Comping – Antoine Perez, Andy Hague
4. What’s the production pipeline like?
Since only a few people work on this at a time its reasonably easy controlling whats going on. Its the kind of pipeline you wish you could employ in commercials. I do the storyboards and animatic, any additional modeling that is needed gets done, the render gets set up while the animation is being done and then everything is rendered and comped. Easy… give or take the months of late nights and screaming at computers.
5. What are some of the most unexpected technical/creative difficulties (if any) that you encountered during the process?
Because the kitty was modeled real scale, none of the particle / physics sims we used worked properly. However creatively it was all pretty straightforward once the original concept was nailed. The absolute joy of working on ones own projects.
6. What next in the Kitteh Kitteh series? When can we expect another film?
Ah… well… money permitting we would like to do another two this year… but they are quite expensive for us and take up a lot of time, always in fact more than we think. They are also going to be screened at a few quite major film festivals, as soon as the programs are announced we’ll post the information on the site, and we have to hold back on releasing the new ones till then.
ADDITIONAL QUESTIONS:
7. What’s your view on the current commercial directing climate? I seem to pick up a general slump in the air. Do you see the light at the end of the tunnel coming soon?
In brief: I don’t know.
It would be too easy to have a big whinge about everything I personally perceive as being wrong with the commercial world and the frustrations that we have had to deal with while working within it. However I don’t honestly think there would be any point, everybody who works in the commercial world has the same gripes and I am fairly certain that those things aren’t going to change anytime soon; that is the industry we choose to work in. While undeniably there are still people out there making amazing stuff you say you have picked up a general negativity in the air and so have I (specifically toward creative work within the commercial industry) and I believe that this is all the more reason to pursue ones own work. I know this is easier said than done and I am hugely thankful that we are in the position to be able to do it. There is a massive amount of fantastic personal work being done out there and it is my hope that this will feed back into the commercial world. Ultimately we, like so many others, are devoted to making the best commercial work that we can; its great to do what one loves but getting paid for it too is just awesome.
P.S. Somebody is going to have to tell somebody else soon that if you want to have great creative then you’re going to have to pay good money for it too!
8. What was Picasso Pictures’ role in this?
Picasso Pictures provided the office space, machines and software and didn’t baulk at us taking time off commercial projects. Their support has been invaluable and is very much appreciated.
9. Finally a couple of cat-specific questions (me being a cat obsessive and all)—-The purring is extremely realistic…was that a real kitty’s purr? or was it a person mimicking the purrs? And is that a scottish fold breed kitten you’ve picked?
The purring is for real 
And the kitty was loosely based upon a British Blue.
Thanks Sam, for taking the time to share this info with our readers! We wish you all the best, on behalf of everyone here at Motionographer, and will look forward to the next installments, when ever that may be!
What is an Executive Producer? This role may go unnoticed by many of us, but the success of a company is often defined by this individual. They shape the culture of the production company they lead. In addition to their sales and strategic roles, they must define and reinforce the creative ethos of the company. This begins with bringing in the right talent and nurturing them to their full potential.
The ways in which this takes place varies from EP to EP. What follows is how some of the good ones do it, including:
Read the round table discussion and get a glimpse into 2010 and beyond.
When we can’t find the words to eloquently describe the sentiments of a photo, we know we can turn to Wu Tang to fill in the gaps. The prophetic adage “life as a shorty shouldn’t be so rough” can pinpoint the mood and tribulations of the Little People in London. Artist Slinkachu will scour and search for these sons and daughters of Preiser and capture the timeless moments of these citizen’s lives. Check out more lifestyle shots after the jump.
Be sure to check out the Wish You Were Here pop up shop on Orchard Street before it ends on Sept. 13th! The concept is to swap up & coming NY and London designers between their respective homes (LDN to NY and vice versa) in order to expose their wares to a whole new audience of fashionable people who may not be familiar with their foreign stylings. Get all the info on who’s participating, exact location, calendar of events and more by clicking HERE.
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.
