This is a personal project by Omar Meradi, started 3 years ago when he was a student at ATI (Arts et Technologie de l’Image, université Paris 8), he finally found the time to finish the work, and it’s a really beautiful achievement. Music by Doug Kaufman.
+
Scotland-based Axis Animation has collaborated with director Ben Hibon and developer ChAIR on a special short film for Infinity Blade III.
Called Infinity Blade: Origins, the visually striking two minute video will also act as the introduction for Epic’s latest entry into its popular action RPG series on mobile. Axis built the 3D characters and used a blend of texturing and shading to add a 2D feel to the video, which was then layered with both 3D and 2D animated visual effects. The short film depicts the forging of the Infinity Blade and the weapon’s subsequent history waging terror and defeating enemies.
Sebastian Strasser from Radical Media has directed this great advertising for Vodafone, entitled “Add Power to your life”.
The project was shot over 8 days in Iceland, Denmark, Germany, the Czech Republic and Romania. During the shoot the team had to navigating some of Europe’s worst flooding in decades, making some of the locations highly treacherous, including the diner, which was left half submerged after a flood had hit the area. The film was shot almost completely using hand held cameras, enabling the team to capture more fluid, natural movements, which were then composited together by Time Based Arts, who did an exceptional job blending the 3D, CGI and live action.
Song by Woodkid – Run Boy Run.
Credits:
Director: Sebastian Strasser
VFX: Time Based Arts
Agency: Jung Von Matt
Producer: Christoph Petzenhauser
Editor: Paul Hardcastle
You may have already seen a trailer for a short film called K3LOID in the past years, it’s now finished and it’s very impressive. Spanish-based J.J. Palomo directed the short and his visual FX shop BLR VFX spent over two years developing it with the intent of turning it into a feature.
Palomo isn’t a complete unknown to Hollywood, he and his team have collaborated with Carl Rinsch several times and worked on the director’s breakout short, The Gift. (And K3LOID‘s concept art was provided by Aaron Beck, the concept designer for Avatar and District 9).
___
In a not too distant future, societies of all countries come to rely on an intricate network of artificial intelligence devices designed to bring efficacy to man’s life. Yet, man continues to devour himself in useless wars. A strong political hierarchy now divides all powers into three factions, and A. I. devices rapidly gain ground as efficiency becomes a priority.
As social revolts grow worse everyday, authorities seek ways to control their citizens. They decide to carry out a series of tests that will determine not only whether some crucial powers can be transferred to non human entities, but also whether man is ready to yield those powers.
The world has become a cell for all man and women, who withstand and endure their lives, rather than living them. Machines might have found a solution.
From now on, you are set free.
___
CREDITS:
Directed by JJ Palomo
Big Lazy Robot Crew :
Hugo Bermudez
Juan Civera
David Cordero
JJ Palomo
Leopoldo Palomo
Concept Design:
BLR
Aaron Beck
Greg Broadmore
Music and Sound Design:
Full Basstards
Online Color Correction and Conform:
Trizz
Manager: Scott Glassgold / IAM Entertainment
Toronto based IAMSTATIC recently launched a montage of 3D stereoscopic work they did for Director Julian Jones’ Inside the Mind of Leonardo Davinci, a movie concerning threads of thought and the working processes of the genius inventor and artist. A total of 30 minutes of stereoscopic shots were designed and animated over an 8 month period. See more on the IAMSTATIC site.
Studio AKA (London) tells the history behind the building of the TSB bank through this beautiful piece.
Combining the hand crafted artistry of 2D character animation within a stunningly integrated use of 3D CGI sets, the journey through time is reflected in the film’s opening shot; an unbroken take which lasts a whopping 95 seconds.
Check out some of the process below. Plus, there’s a 2-part interview on the D&AD website.
Written by – Marc Craste and Damon Collins
Client: TSB
Paul Pester
Catherine Kehoe
Mike Regnier
Terry McParlane
Agency: Joint London
Creative Director – Damon Collins
Producer – Matt Keen
Music: Anne Dudley
Sound Design: Factory
Production Company: Studio AKA
Writer/Director: Marc Craste
Producer: Nikki Kefford-White
Character Design: Steve Small
Additional Art Direction: Dave Prosser
Previsualisation: Christian Mills, Anna Kubik
Supervising Animators: Steve Small, Michael Schlingmann
2D Animators: Peter Dodd, Sharon Smith, Nicolette van Gendt
2D Assistant Animators: Nick Appleton, Gerry Gallego, Freya Hotson, Simon Swales, Margot Tsakiri-Scanatovits, Justine Waldie, Jonathan Wren
2D Paint: Eamonn O’Neill, Kristian Andrews, Gemma Mortlock
2D Compositing: Michael Schlingmann
Supervising CG Artists: James Gaillard, Christian Mills
Modelling & Texturing: Adam Avery, Sara Diaz, Will Eager, Vincent Husset, Raymond Slattery
Rigging: Adam Avery
Lighting, Rendering & Compositing: James Gaillard, Daniel Garnerone, Alex Holman, Christian Mills, Will Eager, Cristobal Infante
Simulation & FX: Cristobal Infante
3D Animators: Boris Kossmehl, Fabienne Rivory, Marie Verhoeven, Lucas Vigroux
Technical Director: Fabrice Altman
Editor: Nic Gill
Production Co-ordinator: Ren Pesci
Production Assistant: Alli Albion
Great animation/illustration and sound design from another Buck — CypherAudio collaboration. Pretty damn cool use of Instagram data too: “For this year’s US Open Tennis tournament, IBM and Ogilvy & Mather invited Buck out to Arthur Ashe Stadium to create live video animations using data from the tournament, delivered via Instagram. Using live data meant designing and deploying a custom toolkit and workflow that could shift with the on-court action, delivering responsive data-based animations, rendered and uploaded in minutes.”
New York-based Blind Pig, sister company to Absolute Post, collaborated with creative agency Hugo & Marie creating Coldplay’s latest music video Atlas, part of The Hunger Games: Catching Fire soundtrack. The video received close to another million views over the weekend, bringing it up to 4.6 million as of today. The amazing, fantastical illustrations, largely based around the celestial sky map and myth by Micah Lidberg, were brought to life by the Blind Pig team over the course of a couple of weeks. Working very closely with director Mario Hugo and Hugo & Marie’s creative team, the Blind Pig crew created a seamless and inspiring animation sequence that held true to the original, artful illustrations.
Award-winning design and digital production company Thornberg & Forester (T&F) has created a brilliant opening title sequence entitled “FRANCO” for The Comedy Central Roast of James Franco. The Roast had its broadcast premiere on Labor Day and it will be rebroadcast many times on the network. Working directly with Comedy Central VP of design Chris Scarlata and Tenth Planet producer, Rick Austin, T&F principals Scott Matz and Justin Meredith were both heavily involved in the project, along with senior art director and designer Kyle Miller and lead animator Ken Krueger.
“One of the best aspects of this project from beginning to end was the freedom to ‘find’ the story as we built out our storyboards,” said Miller. “Our style frames left a lot of open spaces which had to be filled, so we wrote out a script expanding our original kernel of Franco’s multi-level involvement in the making of this film.” … said Matz, “each scene was animated as a united RGB pass that was run through a master After Effects stack to automatically generate the appropriate colors from our chosen palette. Filmic textures and an animated ‘defocus’ treatment was applied the same way. Our ultimate goal was to mindfully and humorously celebrate the many facets of James Franco by showing them through an artfully classic and elegant lens.”
Recently jumped back into the freelance game so I launched a redesigned website and updated show-reel at digitalblackbook.com. Take a look around and let me know what you think – @amador_v
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.
