Hasta La Motion!

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.

Imagine stepping into an elevator and looking through a viewport that reveals your ascension to heaven or—if you’re on your way to the street—your descent to hell (appropriately enough).

This interpretation of Dante’s Divine Comedy is precisely the experience video artist Marco Brambilla (director of Demolition Man) and Toronto-based studio Crush were striving for in Civilization, a video mural created for the new Standard hotel in New York City.

The entire mural uses over 400 video sources, including samples from several films—something Brambilla is well-known for in his work. This particular project came with some special technical challenges, though. Crush explains:

We began with exploring the idea of using a game engine to house the project. Seemed easy, map footage onto planes in space, attach a PC to the elevator and we can move up and down in the game environment all day. Unfortunately, once we started to collage the clips together in the Flame we knew the game engine idea wouldn’t fly.

We approximated that we would have 250 looped HD clips in the environment and our Flame could barely handle it (in the end it was closer to 500 looping clips). We compromised by locking ourselves into the idea that we would create a huge vertical canvas that we would scan up and down on once the elevator was in motion. The final piece was approximately 1920 x 7500 pixels.

Read on for a Q&A with Marco Brambillla and detailed notes from Crush’s Sean Cochrane about the technical challenges behind this project.

For commercial work, Marco Brambilla is represented in the US by The Ebeling Group.

Posted on Motionographer

Check out the Kenneth Cappello show (curated by Tim Barber) at the Milk Gallery, opening June 2nd at 7pm @ 450 West 15th Street.

“Kenneth Cappello grew up on punk rock and skateboarding in Houston, TX. Acid Drop collects the casual snapshots he made as a teenager, in the late 1980s, of his friends skateboarding. The former assistant of photographer David LaChappelle, Cappello’s work has been featured in ID, Vanity Fair, and Dazed and Confused, among other publications. In 2004 he released his first book, Loveless, with Surface to Air, Paris. He lives and works in New York.” – Aaron Rose

As someone who has an intense love-hate relationship with New York, this sweetly animated film from Andy and Carolyn London tugged hard on my heartstrings. It’s a simple concept: Interview New Yorkers and then animate objects in the city to match their personalities. The result is a compelling short that helps me see the city—and its people—in a new light.

If you like this, you might also like Aardman’s candidly charming Creature Discomfort animations.

Via Laughing Squid. Thanks to Todd for the tip!

Posted on Motionographer

The schedule of speakers for F5 is now online!

A brief run-down: Things get started both days around 11am and run until the early evening, with lunch and afternoon breaks for you to grab a drink from the bar and mingle a bit.

By the way, our remaining tickets are moving along at a pretty good clip. I see a sell out on the horizon…

Posted on Motionographer

F5 Schedule of Speakers