barclaycard + the mill: rollercoaster.

In 2008, BBH London created a refreshing and beautifully executed spot for Barclaycard called “Waterslide.” For 2010 they’re back at it, this time with a Nicolai Fuglsig-directed spot called “Rollercoaster.” If you’re wondering what it’s about, the title is pretty self-explanatory.

Created by VFXperts (I just made that term up, I’m not sure I like it, but I’ll keep it for now…) The Mill, the spot is sharp, tight, fearless, and seamless. But despite the technical radness, the best part is that it really does capture the joy behind the idea. It looks good enough to be real and so it feels good enough to be real.

And they were even nice enough to put up a killer making-of vid. I’m always blown away by the level of detail and skill that goes into making motion design of this calibre, and it’s totally worth checking out the process behind “Rollercoaster.”

Via Motionographer

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efterklang + kristian leth: modern drift.

I first discovered Danish experimental pop collective Efterklang when some of their music was featured in Jeremiah Zagar’s brilliant family autobiographical film “In A Dream.” Both the film and the music were some of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.

Efterklang’s sound is ethereal and dreamy and huge. Luckily, it leaves itself so open to visual interpretation. Not a blank canvas, but a launching pad, ready to propel the song into whatever video the lucky director gets to imagine.

For “Modern Drift”, that director is Danish multi-media artist Kristian Leth. The song is gorgeous, and for it Leth has sewn together a stunning and simple vision of nature and life that is achingly lovely.

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01.28.10: sia, kent rogowski, y∆cht & the straight gaze, home video.

A quick list of some awesome things:

+ The incredible Sia announced her Spring North American tour. Sia is one-of-a-kind live, and  “The We Meaning You Tour”, including a stop at Coachella 2010, is a must-see. I. Can’t. Wait.

+ One of my favourite artists, Kent Rogowski, has two killer new prints from his hugely-popular “Bears” series up for grabs on 20×200.

+ I’m super psyched for this. One of my luckiest musical finds of 2009, Y∆CHT & The Straight Gaze, announced their spring “New Mystery Moods” tour, and are hyping it with a killer promo video:

+ Home Video dropped a killer remix of Wave Machines’ “Keep The Lights On.” You should Download it.

zoltán lányi: i’ll have the waldorf salad.

Not only did Zoltán Lányi create this futuristic, fragmented, jolting experimental work to a track by Amon Tobin featuring Bonobo, but he did it while still in school at the Eszterházy Károly College in Eger, Hungary.

To me, the twitching, glitchy POV reminds me of a sort of post-apocalyptic, burned world being studied and leading to the discovery of a whole new level of mechanical life underneath the ruin.

Plus, it’s just really fucking cool.

Via Ventilate

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pick a piper.

Caribou is easily one of the best things that’s happened to music in the last ten years. I remember where I was sitting the first time I heard “Melody Day” and tripped over myself to find out who was making that colossal, layered, glorious mash-up of sound. I didn’t think it could, but it gets better, courtesy of Caribou drummer Brad Weber…

Pick A Piper is a collective from Weber along with Angus Fraser, Dan Roberts, and Clint Scrivener. They leave no sonic stone unturned: flute, trumpets, glockenspiel, flutes, hand claps, bells, and basically anything you can hit to make a sound. But more than anything it’s the percussion assault that gets you. Their music doesn’t just have a beat, it’s multi-rhythmic. It’s expansive, it’s communal. It feels put together from the best parts of a bunch of disparate sounds that only make sense when they’re together.

It feels like it could be chanted. It loops and soars and doesn’t sound like it will ever need to stop, because it’s nothing as easy to know as lyric-chorus-lyric-chorus-bridge-chorus. It’s timeless, like it might have just been dug out of the ground, and it’s also joyous, like it might have been passed down to them from generations. It sounds like happily putting your arm around someone when you’re drunk and staring into a campfire.

So far they’ve only released a 4-song EP, I’ve listened to it constantly for two days. I demand a full-length album. …Please.

For now, stop what you’re doing and listen to my favourite track, “Dené Sled”:

Play “Dené Sled”

Plus check out a grainy, colourful, almost pre-digital looking video, directed by Weber himself, for their single “Rooms.”

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david shrigley for pringle of scotland.

David Shrigley is an animation and illustration icon. One of the few animators whose work is so individual that you can usually immediately recognize it’s Shrigley from a single still, his sparsely drawn, seemingly haphazard illustration work is  legendary.

I was a little surprised and worried when I came across a video by Shrigley for luxury knitwear brand Pringle of Scotland. In January I’d seen on one of my favourite blogs, Kitsune Noir, that Pringle had commissioned one of my favourite photographers, Ryan McGinley, to make a film showcasing the Spring/Summer 2010 line that featured the terrifyingly austere Tilda Swinton wandering the misty Scottish highlands in various knits. To me, it was dull and, while beautiful, a waste of McGinley’s phenomenal talents. I was nervous that Shrigley’s work wouldn’t shine either.

I didn’t need to worry. Not only is the video quintessential Shrigley, but it’s totally entertaining; I laughed out loud more than once. Turns out Pringle of Scotland has a refreshing sense of humour, not only about itself but about the entire fashion industry, and they’re not afraid to show it.

Via Motionographer

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universal everything: reel 2010.

Universal Everything is my favourite motion design shop in the world. Hands down. I’ve written (and raved) about them on shape+colour more than any other agency or artist in the world. Each time they release new work it reinforces my belief that there is always undiscovered art and beauty in the world. I love them and I’ve run out of superlatives.

Now, luckily for me, they’ve just released their new reel for 2010 and I can finally post some of the beautiful work from past projects that I hadn’t because it was older and I was worried I was turning into a stalker. This reel is a magnum opus of awesome. Behold:

If you really want to get into it (and why wouldn’t you?) here are some of my favourite past posts on Universal Everything:

- MTV International Brand Identity

- Advanced Beauty

- 6 Billion People, 6 Billion Colours

- Forever

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spike jonze + method: i’m here.

So, facts are facts and Spike Jonze is a genius. Along with Michel Gondry, he’s one of my long-time favourite directors (ever since his legendary vid for Björk’s “It’s Oh So Quiet” all the way up to last year’s “Where The Wild Things Are”).

His work is filled with explosions of colour, reality mixed with fantasy, waking from daydreams, the importance of memory, sunlit yearning and moments of loss and explorations of our never-ending searches to find ourselves. Jonze is the shit and that’s all there is to it. I’ve felt more full and more empty and more loved and more alone watching his films than any other director.

And now he’s about to explore the humanity of being a robot…

His latest half-hour short film “I’m Here”, screens tonight at Sundance and is scheduled for a release in March. Commissioned in collab with Absolut (and say what you want about corporate sponsorship, Absolut has a long history of supporting the arts and working with up-and-coming designers and artists through various campaigns) it’s the story of  two robots meeting up and falling in love in LA.

The CG character work, from bi-coastal shop Method, is clearly outstanding. The trailer is only 30 seconds and I basically died when I saw it. Once again, Jonze is taking the concept of our most cherished entities – love, beauty, connection – and turning them onto their heads and into something we’d never imagined before.

Via Feed

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erin hanson: reminders.

I’ll admit it; I’m a huge sucker for projects utilizing photograph and text. The possibility for creating a double-meaning between the supposed emotion of the image and the ostensible meaning of the words is like a big ol’ playground. Plus any image that involves cut outs that look like real life old skool refrigerator alphabet magnets is good by me.

Some of my other fave projects in the same vein focus more on emotional depth or existentialist questioning:  Kotama Bouabane’s “Melting Words” is a lonely play on sentiments of love and loss at the end of a relationship, while the large outdoor works of Nathan Coley offer more questions that answers about us, our meaning, and our place in the world.

Taking a totally different route, Erin Hanson’s “Reminders” series is filled with  flashes of our most unremarkable thoughts. Banal, boring, and inconsequential, like little snapshots of the things that run through our minds during a normal day and, more often than not, are dismissed and discarded before we’ve even had a chance to realize we thought them.

To me, though, our hopes and fears can be revealed by piecing together the inconsequential things. Often we push aside everything we don’t feel strong enough to confront into the mundane, and these small thoughts are like after-shocks from much larger quakes. What does our vanity say about our true sense of self-worth, what does our sense of obligation or disconnection to our family say about our sense of home, and what does the need to remind ourselves to wake up or go outside say about our lethargy and our over-willingness to connect and live digitally instead of physically?

Via Share Some Candy

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dark igloo + the pump: do you eat crap?

Last time I was in New York, we stumbled onto The Pump. We were hungry, we were in a hurry, and we’re the kind of assholes who’d rather starve than eat non-organic bison. Luckily The Pump took care of all of that with a killer menu of organic, healthy, chic “fast food.”

I’m hyped to see that their marketing is as savvy and aware as their menu. Their new witty, satirical, retro-tinged online promo vid subtly taps into part of a larger conversation that been evolving the last few years; of what exactly we’re eating, where it’s coming from, and what it’d doing to us. I’d never really looked at the side of a cereal box until I started reading the frighteningly enlightening work of Michael Pollan. His best-sellers “In Defense Of  Food” and “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” (both highly recommended, by the way) are at the forefront of a social rediscovery of “food.”

Created by Dark Igloo,  “Do You Eat Crap?” speaks to the new food movement with a series of snappy, detailed parodies of a whole series of food ads from the last few decades. The cheese spot above is my fave – it’s a perfect throwback to those ’80s, Doyle Dayne Bernbach-esque copy-heavy prints ads, right down to the font. Oh, what I would give to have been a copywriter during the glory days of long copy. A boy can dream…

To me the best part of the spot is that it’s informed by the growing hyper-awareness of food culture but it’s not sanctimonious in its stance. In fact, the video is totally hilarious, but the more interesting bit to me is that I don’t think the real meaning layered behind the humour would have been possible even five years ago. People just weren’t aware enough. While I think it would be still be funny no matter, what really makes it so killer is that it’s a total insider wink to its target: people who are willing to spend $15 on an organic, free-range lunch  and who want to feel like they’re in on the joke everyone eating at Burger King isn’t. And those people, myself among them, like to be winked at.

Via Kitsune Noir

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