Hasta La Motion!

Finally online in all its full-length glory, Doomed: a biological cartoon! by Guillermo García Carsí and El Señor Studio introduce us to endearingly bizarre animals with questionable abilities to play the game of natural selection. Carsí is the creator of the internationally successful children’s show, Pocoyo and Doomed! shares the series’s focus on crafted character design against a simple background.

The wildlife documentary format, made famous by David Attenborough and Marty Stouffer, has inspired many an artist with its stranger than fiction zombie fungus insects and decked out birds of paradise. As with any template, playing within this form creates grounds ripe for humor, as in Waverly Films’ The Amazing Lyrebird of Australia – Unseen Footage. It’s a great framework for a television show – allowing El Señor to highlight as few or many creatures in one setting as they want, as well as leaving the door open to explore real world settings in the future – as hinted in the end of the short.

Hat tip to Short of the Week.

Posted on Motionographer

When we first shared Alex Roman’s The Third&Seventh over a year ago, everyone was stunned by the photorealism of his CG worlds. With his latest commercial work, a spot for Grupo Cosentino’s Silestone brand countertops, Roman once again shows his passion for cinematography, lighting and texture.

Although this spot is 100% CG, the beauty of the shots distract the viewer from this amazing fact. Each composition is elegantly balanced: light counterweights dark, chaos challenges order. The sparse soundtrack creates a sense of lightness and wonder, and we are invited into a world that seems so real, so tangible, that we fully accept the glass-like shattering of grapes and peppers.

It almost doesn’t matter that the spot is purely digital. Sure, it’s an eyebrow-raising footnote, but Roman is simply using the tools he knows best to tell his story. He just happens to be pushing the envelope of commercial CG production while he’s doing it.

Posted on Motionographer

boolab recently teamed up with agency Young & Rubicam Madrid to create a whimsical three-spot testimonial campaign for financial services company BBVA. Directed by Frankie De Leonardis, each spot stars a different Spanish celebrity relating the story of their life to BBVA’s 59+ program for seniors.

We first bumped into De Leonardis’ work via the epic Season 6 Lost promo he directed for Spanish network Cuarto last year. Visually, that project is so radically different from the BBVA work that I wanted find out a little more about this eclectic filmmaker.

Read on for our Q&A with Frankie De Leonardis and a making-of video for the BBVA campaign…

Posted on Motionographer

The mind is wondrous thing, and capturing the essence of its mysterious machinations is no easy task. It was, however, the task that fell to boolab’s Nico Casavecchia, who directed this ethereal promo for Alzheimer International, an initiative promoted by the Pasqual Maragall Foundation.

I love the level of abstraction at work here. It’s all loosely rooted in the actual physiology of the brain, but it is by no means tethered to science. Rather, the focus is on the poetic nature of memories, something Nico portrays with beautiful effectiveness.

Nico explains:

When I was given the Alzheimer’s project, the idea was to speak about the power of the human mind and the risk of losing an entire life’s memories to the disease. From the beginning, I shied away from certain ideas for developing the spot. I wanted to avoid a picture of the human experience through Super 8 movies and other melodramatic devices at all costs. At the same time, the spectator needed to be able to relate to the spot and perceive the intrinsic drama of losing one’s memory.

I didn’t want to perform a technical exercise that would send a cold message. I decided that the best route possible was to use a soundtrack that would transmit “memories” while the image would be an abstract representation of these sounds. Once this became clear, I designed styleframes to define a look for the bubbles, which represented the memories.

Some technical details:

Using Maya, we created a reactive system that modified the geometric parameters of the bubbles in connection with the soundtrack. For me, it was important that keyframe animation be used as little as possible, but that the objects be permitted to come to life thanks to the actual sounds. Once the soundtrack was finished, we simply let our memory bubbles dance with the sounds, after which we only had to sew the takes together in comp.

Watch this motion test to see the “memory bubbles” reacting to audio input:

Agency: Externa Comunicación (Rory Lambert, Creative Director)

Posted on Motionographer

boolab/Nico Casavecchia: Alzheimer International