Crave (2012): re-blog from Art of Title





“His imagination is a dangerous place to be.”

The main-on-end titles for Charles de Lauzirika’s psychological noir Crave take what is at root a basic child’s toy to grim extremes. Wind-driven, humanoid whirligigs are torn apart and re-purposed into disturbing wooden mechanisms acting out vigilante fantasies from the film – images from a nightmare. The angular type stands out from the grit and grain as the camera transitions from grisly scene to grisly scene, each segment part of a larger, interconnected machine which could only be stopped by its own friction.
Director CHARLES DE LAUZIRIKA and main title designer RALEIGH STEWART discuss the creation of the sequence with us.
Can you give us a little background on yourselves?
CL: I was born and raised in LA and I was obsessed with cinema. I went to USC Film School, where I met a lot of great, talented friends, and landed a series of internships and low-level jobs at production companies which got me in the door. The most important relationship to emerge was with Ridley and Tony Scott and their company Scott Free. I started as an intern, became a script reader,...

RSS & Email Subscribers: Check out the full Crave article at Art of the Title.

Weekend Animation Break: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12

Weekend Animation Break: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12:re-blog from Create Digital Motion

Behold the power of sound and image. With people of a certain generation, you can stand in a room, and shout, “One, two, three, four, five…” and likely have them finish your countdown with the song from this animation. It has its own Wikipedia entry. It has music from The Pointer Sisters. It’s been covered by … a lot of people. The segment was the work of San Francisco director Jeff Hale, a psychedelic journey through a wonderland of numbers in the style of pop art-style album covers. (See the full sequence re-edited, since Children’s Television Workshop – now Sesame Workshop – didn’t include it.)
What you may not have seen was the 2010 remake, produced by the Italian animation studio Florence Animation, with music by Beirut’s Perrin Cloutier. It’s a pitch-perfect homage, and demonstrates how, in place of traditional animation techniques, we now have access both to low-fidelity techniques (stop motion, aided by computers and vastly cheaper photography equipment) and new digital motion graphics. Sure, the groovy 70s Sesame Street is gone, but we have all the tools to keep the spirit alive.
Read up on a whole history of this animation – and, perhaps, find other Muppet inspiration for your motion work. Hope you’re having a fine weekend, indeed.

Julia Pott: Belly

re-blog from Motionographer



Julia Pott: Belly:
Julia Pott (Hornet) is one of those rarities: an animation director with a unique voice who can actually make you feel something. The common denominator in her work is an intense yearning — an often funny and sometimes painful search for something intimate and real. Whether the subject is love or loss, Julia’s work feels like a confession from a best friend whispered from somewhere inside a massive pillow fort you’ve constructed together during a summer weekend.
After a long and successful run on the festival circuit, including stops at Sundance, Animafest Zagreb, SXSW, the Holland Animation Film Festival and the Hiroshima International Animation Festival (among many others), Julia’s animated short “Belly” has been released on the web.
Created for her thesis at the Royal College of Art, “Belly” is a touching animated short rendered in Julia’s disarming illustration style. Its cast of animal characters are poignantly human, delivering understated dialogue during a surreal rescue mission with a heart-wrenching conclusion.
We caught up with Julia for a little Q&A and a glimpse at the process behind “Belly.”
Who are you and what do you do?

I’m Julia Pott and I’m a British animation director living in Brooklyn.

Where did the idea for “Belly” come from?

The starting point for “Belly” centred around the cross-over period between going to sleep in back of the car at night, then seamlessly waking up in my bed the next morning. Then I got too old and heavy and was woken up by my parents, forced to trudge upstairs, brush my teeth and put myself to bed. I remember being acutely aware that I had had things pretty good for a while, and now it was over.
Growing up with a sister five years older then me, I spent a large period of my childhood feeling generally hard done by, ostracized and left out. I was so desperate to speed through the process of being a kid that I didn’t stop to appreciate what I would be leaving behind. Once it’s been given up, it’s gone. You can remember the sensation, you can feel it in the pit of your stomach, but you cannot get back there – hence the title, “Belly.”

Once I knew I wanted to focus on childhood I indulged myself in the memories of my own. As a kid I think we more willingly immerse ourselves in the uncanny, happy to feel inexplicably weird. We consume horror, gore and casual death. I was absolutely fascinated by the idea of sinking in quicksand, being beheaded, ghosts… As I got older, I grew out of my kid-like immunity to the spooky – not so ready to feel scared, not wanting to feel it at all, in fact.
The laws of physics are also much more ambiguous. It seems feasible to walk through walls, push your hands through your skin. In this way animation became the perfect medium for the subject matter – using the physics of childhood to externalise the inner turmoil of the characters – melting into the ground when you’re yelled at, pushing through your friend’s body if it’s a quickest way to get down.
Summer became the natural setting for the film because of this sense of possibility that comes with the season. So much of my childhood memories centre on the heat of summer, playing in the ocean and feeling like you might almost drown when a wave crashes over you, and going back for more anyway.

Character Development
For me, the film seems to collapse the mental division between childhood and adulthood. You’ve presented some themes that are universal, regardless of age: love, rejection, companionship, loss. Is all this just me looking too deeply into the film or were you aiming to hit some of those ideas?

No, this is absolutely the crux of the film. You can feel these sensations at any age. There is a line in, ‘The Hotel New Hampshire’ by Jon Irving that says: “You spend half your life being 15.”
So far, I show no signs of outgrowing 15. I can be in an awkward social situation, and I am a kid again, wanting to bury myself in the floor. A relationship can end, and it joins your childhood memories in your belly – another period of your life that you remember, even yearn for, but can never return to.

Style frames
The visual style is a unique mix of 2D elements and occasional live action footage, right? What were some of your inspirations for the visual style?  

Inspiration for the visuals and the subject matter went hand in hand. I went back to the shows from my childhood, re-watching 90’s kid’s TV like Eerie Indiana, Round the Twist and Goosebumps but also coming of age films that fell into this specific genre of loss, horror and humor: Harold and Maude, The Goonies, Twin Peaks, Stand by Me.
The film that resonated with me the most during my narrative and aesthetic development was E.T., with the two protagonists becoming so emotionally connected that when one becomes ill, they both deteriorate together. On the aesthetic side, endearing otherworldly creatures appealed to me – E.T., Gizmo from Gremlins – not real creatures and yet we feel this emotional warmth for them. They tapped into this spooky, childlike style I was trying to achieve.
With live action as such a heavy frame of reference I was compelled to incorporate it into the film, but not so much as it would overwhelm the visuals – it become a subtle addition – like moving collage.
The 2D animation aesthetic drew on this genre of 90’s coming of age film’s but also looked at animations that revelled in the medium – Silly Symphonies, the Fleischer Brothers, Estonian animation that embraced squash and stretch, playing with the line and taking something to its most ridiculous conclusion.

How long did you work on the project?

It was my thesis film from the Royal College of Art so production spanned from the end of October to June, so about 8 months. I spent three to four months developing the script and characters, and the end of January onwards was spent on production. It was my first completely original script, so a large majority of the first three months was spent berating my own writing abilities and cursing myself for thinking it wouldn’t be that hard to write a script from scratch.

Motion test
How did you pick the rest of your team?

Sound was incredibly important to the film. Dave Prosser had graduated the year before me and his film “Matter Fisher” had brilliant sound. I worked with his sound designer Joseph Tate from the beginning– geeking out over the best sound for ripping off limbs and sliding through bodies. (I believe Joe spent a lot of time standing in large vats of porridge to achieve the sensation.)
Finding the right voice over artists was a bit of a struggle for me, as I had these perfect imaginary voices ringing in my ears and to find that person wasn’t easy. Each part was auditioned for by 50 or so people, and for a while no one seemed to fit the bill. I lucked out with Oscar, who was played by Livvy, my sister’s… boyfriend’s… niece.
The relationship was mutually beneficial because I’d go round her house to run through the script, and then she’s build a giant wall out of pillows and we’d run into it as hard as we could. She’s bloody brilliant. Cornelius Clarke who plays Oscar’s monster was one of the kindest, gentlest people I’ve met – every line he spoke made me want to weep.
In terms of animation we have first-years from the RCA help us out for a week or so, and I was lucky enough to nab two of the best – Eamonn O’Neill and Ben Cady. I had some extra help from Robin Bushell, one of the members of my old collective, Treat Studios. The boy is an animation genius and can copy my drawing style to the letter.

What’s your favorite moment? Why?

Being a year since it’s completion, I still find myself in that period where everything about the film seems a little bit rubbish, but the more distance I get from it, the more aspects of it grow on me.
I think my favourite plot device of the film was repurposing the eerie sonar of a whale and giving it a new significance. It came to represent so much of what I was trying to say, encapsulating this permanent sense of loss in a literal haunting moan.

What was the most challenging aspect of the project?

At the beginning of the project I foolishly let myself be overrun with this sense of panic that this would be the last time, for a long time, that I would have full control over my own short film. “Belly” became the vessel for tackling every aspect of filmmaking I felt I was weak in.
I wrote a script from scratch, worked with live action, worked with a cast of actors, animated and composited a film (almost) entirely by myself. With previous films, I had always managed to sideline a lot of these tasks so this time around I didn’t want to shy away from anything. There were moments when I genuinely thought about packing it all in and moving to New York prematurely to avoid how hard it all was. I am, of course, glad I didn’t.
That being said, I think the biggest challenge was making something people might not like. Having worked as an illustrator and animator for a few years, my work had fallen into this genre of romantic love. I was comfortable there and had had relative success in it. I felt tapped out. Having gone back to the genre again and again, I was left going into my second year at the RCA uninspired and exhausted.
When I pushed myself to think harder about what it is I loved about animation and film and generally being a person, I became excited again. Once I knew what I wanted to make and was motivated to research it, play around with it and pull it apart (literally), I didn’t care what anyone would think at the end, I was just relieved to have reignited my love of the medium. So I guess I finally realized the old cliché that the biggest challenge also has the biggest pay off.

What’s next for you?

I moved to New York last October and signed to the Manhattan-based production company Hornet. It’s the first time in my life I feel like a proper person — possibly because living in New York makes me feel like I’m living in a movie and everything I do should be set to the When Harry Met Sally soundtrack.
I have spent the last year travelling the festival circuit with “Belly,” and the highlights have to be seeing it play at Sundance and SXSW. With all the moving about I have yet to really settle into Brooklyn life, and I am keen to stay put for a while. I am currently finishing up a Random Acts film, which will air in a few months on Channel 4. After that, I want to start writing again, developing a script for TV or film. I’ll be working on my first live action music video in September, potentially with a lot of pastel glitter.

Benjamin Ducroz: Points in Space

Benjamin Ducroz: Points in Space:

POINTS IN SPACE from ducroz on Vimeo.


Benjamin Ducroz mixes materials like plywood, thread, nails, printouts, and watercolor with his 3D animations to create film such as Phosphene and Press+. His most recent film, Points in Space, uses 1,050 individual a0 sized frames with long exposure photography to explore the flowing movement around Melbourne.


MAKING OF POINTS IN SPACE from ducroz on Vimeo.


 points in space

director : benjamin ducroz

sound : singlesignal

producer : ashlee arnold

assistant animator : hamish storrie

volunteers : amber chou, radhika chopra, jane smith, toby feldman

year : 2011

duration : 1″13
Posted on Motionographer

Tyger

Back to the Start

A Piece of Christmas [HD]

Etsy Redesign Selected Pieces

Nathan Love for Sweet N’ Low

Nathan Love for Sweet N’ Low:
Nathan Love never fails to deliver. In a style reminiscent of ’60s and ’70s pop art, the gang whips up a playful two spot package for everyone’s favorite saccharine sweetener, Sweet N’ Low. In Cloud Rainbow and Sun Moon, viewers go back in time to an illustrative style evocative of such psychedelic artists as Heinz Edelmann and Peter Max. The Director of the spots, Anca Risca, elaborates:

“This project was alot of fun! As a first-timer directing a 2D spot, it was exciting to see it all come together and to be a part of the process.

The first step we took was to visualize the scripts into design frames, which were inspired by (and designed to be cohesive with) Sweet’N Low’s previous pattern-heavy print ad campaign. As we began fleshing out the storyboards and animatics, we brainstormed different ideas for the gags and details of the story. What does a cloud store between his puffs alongside his precious zero calorie sweetner? Sugary cupcakes? A horn or drumset? A lamb or a cloud-shaped sheep? The creative felt very freeform, and with such a well established brand it was refreshing to do away with the traditional commercial product end tag and incorporate it more into the story.

Music for this project was also a big factor for me- I really wanted to capture the light-hearted feeling that these characters carried, and I thought of laid back ukulele music as my instrument of choice.

With a dream team of only 3, animation and finishing happened quickly and smoothly, after which we all had cake and beer! Yaaay.”

Holy Flying Circus animations

Holy Flying Circus animations:re-blog from CRBlog

I really enjoyed last night's Holy Flying Circus on BBC4, the part-fact part-surrealist dramatisation of the furore surrounding the release of the Monty Python film, Life of Brian. It had some great animated sequences, too, that paid homage to the pioneering work of Terry Gilliam. Here's how director Jim Le Fevre made them...

Le Fevre, a freelance director also repped by Nexus Productions, created the opening titles based upon his own ‘Phonotrope' machine. This technique sees a sequence of pictures laid out around the circumference of a record player which, when spun at a fixed speed of 45 RPM, is then filmed by a camera running at 25 frames per second, creating the illusion of animation.



In Le Fevre's ‘making of' film, shown below, the opening titles begin around the two minute mark, though are "an early rough cut to show the sequence in context," he says on his blog about the project at jimlefevre.com. "The eventual edit of the film had different book-ends which also meant losing the final cloud sequence."









Approached to work on the project by Polly Leys, Kate Norrish and Owen Harris of Hillbilly Films last year, explains Le Fevre, he welcomed the fact that "the budget was extremely low which meant that the passion (from both sides) needed to be extremely high." Also significant was that it was to be "a drama that had at its roots a powerful starting point in animation, namely that of Terry Gilliam who, although he never understood it at the time, was creating a new chapter in the use and technique of animation."

Le Fevre says that his work aimed to mirror Gilliam's "passion, craft and approach" that had "created an utterly ground breaking new form of animation (and comedy) through necessity on minimum budget and found something through problem solving. Well, we had the minimum budget box ticked. That was when I realised the Phonotrope technique was ready to be used."



After designing a new, large-scale Phonotrope on the computer in 3D Studio Max and creating the animated loops in After Effects, the sequences were laid out onto A2 sheets and printed onto heavy stock.

Then, the outline frames of the sequences were laser cut (by Ewen Dickie at Laser Make) with over 2,000 produced in all. "Gordon Allen and Gee Staughton from We Are The Art Department took up the reigns to physically build the structure of the Phonotrope," Le Fevre explains, "with Gordon carefully spending time figuring out a system to be able to revolve the structure at a fixed (and constant) speed."



The eventual structure was 1.2 metres wide at the base and 2.1 metres tall. "We had to use a combination of a motion control rig and a 14" ball-bearing ring to be able to spin the Phonotrope," says Le Fevre, "and due to the weight of the tower it took around ten seconds to get up to speed and, more importantly as we discovered to our cost, about 16 seconds to ramp down to a stop.

"It should be noted that the final stage of the Phonotrope, the clouds and tower, never made it into the film as the linking scene involving chewing gum and a foot that followed it got cut, so you will probably have to wait for the DVD extras to see that!"

The final Phonotrope that was used in the film is currently in the foyer of Nexus Productions' London offices. For the full story of Le Fevre's work on the animations for Holy Flying Circus, visit jimlefevre.com. Holy Flying Circus is on the BBC iPlayer, here.

The world's largest stop-motion animation

The world's largest stop-motion animation:re-blog Computerlove

Gulp' is a short film created by Sumo Science at Aardman, depicting a fisherman going about his daily catch. Shot on location at Pendine Beach in South Wales, every frame of this stop-motion animation was shot using a Nokia N8. There's also a making of. Cool.
Gulp. The world's largest stop-motion animation shot on a Nokia N8. on Vimeo

Herbst

Herbst:re-blog from The Art of the Title Sequence

• Watch QuickTime 480p
• Watch QuickTime 720p

In a beautifully minimalist re-telling of the first World War drama Herbst, Clemens Wirth captures moments in the lives of the characters. A man covetously looks on an idyllic scene from afar, a woman waits alone at a window as the day crawls by, and bombs fall on men frozen in time as the highly saturated world moves around them, all helpless to a great and terrible machine acting upon them. Mixing crisp type with the sensuous ink drawing of the movie’s title and set to the brooding piano of Lukas Wagner, we bear witness to the characters’ call to arms, their tragedy, and the collateral damage borne from their delicate arcs.


With a planned release of Spring 2012 and filmed on location in Vienna and the Austrian Mountains, Herbst (German for “Autumn”) is a work from alumni and students of the University of Applied Sciences Salzburg.


- Jonathan Dube, Contributing Author

PROJECT BREAKDOWN

Title design enthusiast and macro photographer Clemens Wirth details the creation of the end credit sequence for us.

Clemens Wirth: The first thing I did was read the script again, to [recapture] the feel of the story. I also watched movies like All Quiet on the Western Front and worked my way through WWI illustrated books to sensitize me more to the topic. I thought of the toy soldiers like the ones in Toy Story and, as I'm a macro enthusiast and because I've gathered some experience in this area, I decided to make the titles on a small scale. After some investigation I found the right figures (pewter figures have limitations and were ruled out).

Model examples (3 images)

I agglutinated and colored them and they became my actors. Instead of letting the characters move, the idea was that the environment around them should have a slight motion, achieved with various weather effects and also some interaction with light and shadow. For example, the girl at the window was time lapsed so that the sunshine moves on the floor.

Initial photographic tests (7 images)

I always try to combine and mix several techniques and make most of practical effects, but with this scale it becomes difficult, so I had to add some in post production. I tried to make very “photographic” images, each scene different, minimalistic but detailed. The footage was captured with smooth dolly shots on a DIY slider and my beloved Canon 5D Mark II equipped with a 100mm macro lens, with some camera movements done in post.

Shooting and editing setup (2 images)

In the film there will be smooth dissolves from real footage to ink drawings. I transferred this element to the titles with the drawings. I have to mention that I was also inspired by the Sherlock Holmes titles from Prologue for this effect, but I didn't want to overstate this transition, because it's just a small part in the actual film and that’s why it's only around the actual title.

Ink lettering tests (3 images)

The title consists of china ink with each letter captured separately (thanks to Philipp Gstrein for his help) and composited together in After Effects. The various handcrafted miniature sets were built with objects from mother nature and model making materials. It was not always easy to get the detailed look I wanted, but it was fun and gave variety to the working process on the computer.

[RSS & email readers: see full post for video]

Ink Tests (Click to Watch)

The music and sound design is Christoph Plohovich and pianist Lukas Wagner. As video and audio kissed the first time something really new emerged... this was the moment in which all efforts paid off.

Example of scale (Click to Enlarge)

Full details for our Herbst post are available at Art of the Title.

Stop Motion Experiment

Stop Motion Experiment:


Not everything is as it seems in this fun stop action experiment from 23lunes

Looks That Kill

Looks That Kill:re-blog from Motionographer




Kevin Dart and Stéphane Coëdel direct this retro-flavored short starring Yuki 7 and the Gadget Girls





PRE-ORDER THE BOOK + DVD NOW! yuki7.bigcartel.com/​product/​looks-that-kill

Joseph Pierce: A Family Portrait

Joseph Pierce: A Family Portrait:re-blog from Motionographer

After a lengthy festival run, Joseph Pierce‘s A Family Portrait makes its online debut, presented by the hardworking fellows over at Short of the Week. It’s an awkward, uncomfortable moment with a family collapsing at the seams under the photographer’s (and our) eyes. The surreal play on rotoscoping was earlier explored in Pierce’s National Film & Television School graduation film, Stand Up.

Gobelins: Annecy 2011

Gobelins: Annecy 2011:re-blog from Motionographer
The second year students at Gobelins have made another round of short films to celebrate Annecy 2011. There’s five of them, each impressive, check them all out after the jump.



Lights Out – Aloyse DESOUBRIE BINET, Sandrine HAN JIN KUANG, Stéphanie PAVOINE, Jonathan VERMERSCH, Etienne METOIS





Grand Central – Charlotte CAMBON, Théo GUIGNARD, Noé LECOMBRE, Hugo MORENO, Soizic MOUTON



Oh gee Oh why – Hanne GALVEZ, Yoann HERVO, Juliette LAURENT, Stéphanie MERCIER, Pierre ZENZIUS



Hello Brooklyn – Alice BISSONET, Benjamin MOREAU, Corentin PENLOUP, Marion ROUSSEL, Louis THOMAS



Jazz’in – Joël CORCIA, Wandrille MAUNOURY, Bong NGUYEN, Thomas RETEUNA, Bernard SOM

Cinemagraphs by Jamie Beck and Kevin Burg

Cinemagraphs by Jamie Beck and Kevin Burg:re-blog from Computerlove

Jamie (Photography), and Kevin (Web Design/Motion) worked together creating beautiful and intricate animated gifs they called Cinemagraphs. Utilizing an old technique to create something new and beautiful with such attention to detail and love is truly impressive and inspiring!

“Our first few animated images were sequenced still shots looped in rapid succession which is a fairly common way of making an animated image. From there we began utilizing more fluid motion isolated in certain parts of an image to capture a moment of time, but also to un-freeze a still photograph by showing that moment’s temporal movement. The process involves still and video photography but editing is very manual and varies greatly from one to another so we’re routinely solving new problems when creating them...

If you want to know more about how they created these pictures, here is the link

http://diegoguevara.com/blog/2011/05/05/cinemagraphs/

GIF-ITTI | INSA

GIF-ITTI | INSA:re-blog from Computerlove

White Walls: INSA 'Online Love' from Unit44 on Vimeo.

INSA brings his innovative GIF-ITTI to the White Walls Project as he
completes his biggest and most complex moving piece to date. 3 days in the sun re-painting this monster
wall 4 times to give us this completely original result.


The beauty of INSA's GIF-ITI is that it only truly lives when viewed
online, where these days most street art ends up being viewed, and
exaggerates the ephemeral nature of graffiti as each layer is painted
instantly over the last. Mixing retro internet technology and labour
intensive painting, INSA creates slices of infinite un-reality, cutting
edge art for the tumblr generation.

Unit-44.com/​INSA

www.insaland.com


Other Examples

Psyop Unfolds a Community

Psyop Unfolds a Community:

Psyop unfolds a community in their latest pop-up book style spot for JPMorgan Chase via mcgarrybowen.

Full credits.

LEGS – Evian ‘Babies Inside’

LEGS – Evian ‘Babies Inside’:

LEGS – Evian ‘Babies Inside‘ Thanks Kris