Hasta La Motion!

Long ago, Virgin Airways embraced the simple fact that no one pays attention to the poor flight attendants as they drone on mechanically about oxygen masks and flotation devices.

Why not use that time to share something genuinely entertaining, something that communicates the necessary safety information and conveys the playfully chic persona of the Virgin brand?

Take a Trip

The latest in Virgin’s flight safety film series, “Trip,” comes from Art&Graft. At over 5 minutes long, it’s an ambitious project. But the premise behind the film gave the team essentially unlimited creative freedom.

At the film’s opening, a drowsy passenger slips into a dream state while the flight attendant recites her safety spiel. We follow the passenger through a series of surreal vignettes inspired by genres of film, everything from sci-fi to westerns. Each scene communicates a core safety tip before moving on to the next unexpected scenario.

Process

Art&Graft shares a bit of their process on their website:

To bring our ideas to life, the A&G team combined an illustrative approach with exciting 3D and 2D animation techniques. All the character animation was produced using a traditional frame-by-frame technique – very labour intensive, especially when creating a 6 minute film, but the results look beautiful and are extremely rewarding!

Elements throughout the film were modelled in 3D; allowing us to ’wrap’ our illustrations around these models to keep the illustrative feel yet giving the scenes fantastic depth and space. This allowed all the camera angles to be planned out and ensure the 2D characters could then be animated in each scene with the addition of further textures and casted shadows.

Other Virgin Airways films

Virgin Atlantic Flight Safety Video (2008)

Virgin + method “We’re All in This Together”

Over the last several years, Buck has made a point of creating elegantly clever PSAs for causes they believe in. For their latest visual essay, they partnered with Idaho-based agency Drake Cooper to spread the message of the J.A. and Kathryn Albertson Foundation.

With charming audio from Echolab, the spot has a folksy quality befitting its subject matter. As usual for Buck, the transitions serve up delightful surprises by the eye-full while visual metaphors peppered throughout the poignant script give the spot equal measures of weight and wit.

Posted on Motionographer

UPDATE: English VO version found on youtube! Thanks for the info, tvp.

Kenichi Tanaka made this thesis piece to show his countrymen that things that take place in Japan, ‘isn’t that normal’. So the tale was told from a foreigner’s viewpoint rather than a Japanese’s, but he begs ‘please don’t call me racist, because I am one of short, small eyes Japanese ;P’. This is a smart and insightful piece because of the cultural self-awareness of its maker. Definitely a significant contribution to the world of visual essays.

We are not sure why it’s not available in English, (see English VO version link at the top) but to those of you who don’t speak Japanese, watching this humorous infographics animation while not understanding the VO, somehow adds another layer of complexity and heightens the uniqueness of the viewing experience. To find out more about the piece, be sure to visit Kenichi’s blog, here.

Thanks for the tip, Boca & Bran!

Posted on Motionographer

Building on the success of his incredibly lucid and educational animation, “The Crisis of Credit Visualized,” designer/animator Jonathan Jarvis announced an interesting new venture, The New Mediators, which launched in earnest a few months ago.

To quote the introductory video above, The New Mediators builds diagrams using a “design language that can be assembled quickly, almost in real-time, and universal enough to be adapted.”

What Jarvis is proposing goes beyond motion graphics into the fields of journalism, education and activism (though he doesn’t seem to actively acknowledge that last one). Unlike visual essays, which use metaphor to suggest multiple layers of meaning at once, Jarvis is interested instead in simplifying and demystifying our complex world.

This is the general aim of information graphics and in itself is nothing new, but Jarvis’ real-time twist points to an exciting array of possibilities that are only now being tapped.  Before I go on, take a moment to watch Jarvis deconstructing Obama’s stimulus package before a live audience:

Finally, all those touchscreen doohickeys that cable news networks have been stockpiling can be put to good use! Imagine real-time diagrams to explain things like tax bills, health care reform or even the socio-political histories of warring nations.

There are two prerequisites for such a communicative model to work in practice, though:

1. The designer must have an exceptionally clear understanding of the subject matter. In natural speech, we can can afford to be sloppy. Our languages have a built-in allowance for mistakes and vagueness which is typically compensated for by simply increasing the amount of talking we do about a given subject. Eventually, with enough clarification and circumscription, everyone will understand what we’re saying, more or less.

Design languages are much less forgiving. Put a symbol in the wrong place or draw an arrow in the wrong direction, and you could fundamentally alter the truth of a diagram. An unclear hierarchy of visual elements could even be life-threatening. Just ask Edward Tufte.

2. The designer must be aware of the passage of time. This might sound so obvious that it verges on idiotic, but this is the real magic behind Jarvis’ approach. A static diagram can be extremely useful, but a diagram being constructed or manipulated before our eyes has the potential of creating deep insight.

Don’t believe me? Watch Hans Rosling’s TED talk for an excellent explanation:

The fourth dimension allows us to see information in ways that simply aren’t possible otherwise. In the case of Jarvis’ performative take on information graphics, the act of building a graph is itself the time-based device that gives us insight.

It’s not an easy thing to master, and Jarvis is unique in his innate understanding of human perception as it relates to comprehension.

The New Mediators is as exciting as it is vital to our future understanding of a world that is only increasing in complexity. Whatever happens next, I hope Jarvis and others like him are there to explain it to me.

Posted on Motionographer