robert seidel.

I’m a big time fan of Robert Seidel. Blurring the traditional lines between film-making and animation, his organic and ebullient work teems with an almost living energy as he studies the shapes and patterns created by an environment and then overlays that with his own graphic style. The resulting mix, an other-worldy visual evolution of nature and technology, is always beautiful and shockingly unique. They are so rooted in experience that they seem familiar, but at the same time we know we’re looking at something we’ve never seen before. It’s almost jarring, but incredibly so.

His latest work is no exception. “Human Paint” is a stunning new identity for England’s Channel 5, while “Dream Mountains” was commissioned by Hong Kong’s IdN Magazine for part of its upcoming anniversary.

I first discovered Seidel in 2006 when he directed one of my favourite videos to one of my favourite songs of all time. It’s a lot of favourite, I know, but the sleek, moody perfection that is his video for Zero 7‘s “Futures” is undeniable. Watch it and let your jaw drop.

Deservedly so, Seidel is also part of the motion design dream team that have created pieces for Universal Everything’s amazing Advanced Beauty HD-DVD project. Seidel’s contribution, “Appearing Disappearance”, is crazy beautiful and the teaser below looks unbelieveable…

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Continuing to push and innovate, this year Seidel took his work off the screen and into the real world. In “Processes: Living Paintings” he projeted a 15 x 36 metre projection onto the side of the Phyletics Museum in Jena, Germany. Transferring his swirling, elemntal style from animation into light, he created an installation of strobbing, rippling, shifting colour that’s not like anything I’ve ever seen before. As with all his work, it’s more like he managed to make something inanimate come alive, rather than