selfburning: field.

An intense and amazing experimental short from Russian animation and experimental motion team Selfburning.

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anthony burrill: acid washed.

No words. Should’ve sent a poet. Some vintage-tinged graphic kick ass from U.K. designer Anthony Burrill.

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more soon: tales of the unexpected.

Wow. This is two years old, but I had to post it. Commissioned by Denmark’s Ei’Kon, More Soon’s ‘Tales Of The Unexpected” is simply one of the best pieces of motion design I’ve ever seen. Ever.

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daniel franke + ryoji ikeda: one minute soundsculpture.

This kicks serious ass. It’s a chromatic hovering expanding blossom of goodness. Created by Daniel Franke to “One Minute” by Ryoji Ikeda.

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onedotzero + karsten schmidt: adventures in motion 2009/10.

I frequently find myself wishing that I lived in London, for various reasons. Now another major one is just around the corner…

Onedotzero_adventures in motion is back and showcasing some of the world’s most innovative motion design from Sept. 9-13. The incredible lineup of screenings, installations, and more makes me drool. It’s visual Utopia.

For this year’s visual identity and festival trailer, one of my favourite digital motion artists, the bad ass Karsten Schmidt, teamed up with Wieden+Kennedy London to create sinewy, flowing, fluid tendrils of text that eventually link together to form the festival logo . All of the copy was gleaned from onedotzero’s social media portals or pulled from blogs and Vimeo comments, symbolizing the collaborative nature of the festival and of the viewers’ comments and feelings forming its foundation. I wonder if one of mine is in there somewhere…?

The result is nicely symbolic, pertinent, and deceptively difficult to create.

If anyone would like to fly me to London to blog from onedotzero, I’m totally down. Just putting it out there. Anyone…?

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the lost levels + steve jones: the early sheets.

Ok, I know I’m a sucker for anything 8-bit related, but I just died. And went to pseudo-Super Mario 2-D  heaven. At least that’s where it starts out, and then it just gets increasingly awesome from there. Be sure to watch it to the very, very end.

UK-based digital artist and animator Steve Jones (a.k.a. Eyebath) created this piece of radness for The Lost Levels’ track “The Early Sheets.” Jones only had this one vid up on his Radar profile. Please sir, can I have some more? I’m not sure why I just quoted “Oliver”, but I think it’s because Jones is British.

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marko ljubez: wintermoon.

I immediately love all things Scandinavian. Swedish VFX designer Marko Ljubez’s “Wintermoon” is “a project that was born out of the dark Scandinavian winter.”

And that’s all I needed to know.

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Ljubez’s website is pretty stellar, including lots of interesting behind the scenes info into his work as a 3D artist and digital matte painter at stopp. That stuff is basically geek candy. Tasty. But I especially love his Photoshop Freestyle Sessions, where he dreams up fucking unreal images like “Cloud Boy”:

Via No Zap

clusta: plus+.

This is really intense. I like intense.

Created by UK/LA based digital design shop Clusta for a Birmingham design expo in 2006. Three years later this shit still blows my socks off…

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universal everything: 6 billion people, 6 billion colours.

Universal Everything is heaven. Utopia. Shangri-La. A creative Eden. Any of those good places you want to go when you die.

To promote their new E71 phone, Universal Everything continued its collaboration with Nokia as one of four artists asked to produce videos for “Beautiful Connections”, a minisite exploring the beauty of connection. Also featuring work from Carl Burgess, field, and SHFT, each film is up for download, has an available wallpaper, and the site invites you to create and upload your own vids as well.

No big surprise, but Matt Pyke, Maxim Zhetskov, and Simon Pyke’s contribution for Universal Everything, “6 Billion People, 6 Billion Colours” was my fave. It resounds not just with the feeling of connection and human interaction given to these little shapes, but to the possibility of inspiration and change. How amongst even the largest masses an individual has the ability to impact all the others, and create a more beautiful, harmonious, connected existence. Plus the soundtrack, created by Simon Pyke’s Freefarm, is un-freaking-believable.

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I read an interesting opinion from Martina, creator of Adverblog, that the site is “…made of four very beautiful videos and not much else… I have contrasting feelings about marketing initiatives that mix art and advertising. As usual I have a very pragmatic approach, and I appreciate and understand them only when the brand and the product fit the artwork.”

I humbly disagree. But, then again, I’m artsy. For me, a brand with enough balls to promote and patron the creation of art and ideas is worthy of my loyalty because it does so without tying it in so neatly to the product. Similar to Sony’s groundbreaking “Colour Like No Other” campaign, these companies are taking something fairly techno-boring (unless you’re a techie) and imbuing it with an emotion. An artistic feeling. And for me that demonstrates not just an evolved thinking but the trust that I’m smart and saavy enough to relate back without having technical specs and other traditional sales pitches thrown at me. These types of venutres create the ultimate brand connection – they make me feel something.

advanced beauty is finally released.

It was exactly one year ago tomorrow that I first posted about Advanced Beauty. I’ve been literally obsessed with its evolution ever since. Boasting an incredible list with some of the best talent working in motion graphics today – we’re talking Mate Steinforth, Carl Burgess, Karsten Schmidt, Robert Seidel, Pandapanther, Peppermelon, Minivegas, and way more – it’s easily been one of my most anticipated projects of the year.

I was hooked (freakishly in love with, actually) Advanced Beauty from the second I saw its jaw-dropping teaser trailer:

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Finally, after all the waiting, the HD-DVD is now for sale around the world and I got my hands on one last week. This is one of the rare and wonderful moments where you can declare, unequivocably and without reserve, that the result was absolutely beyond worth the wait. I watched it three times in a row on my first sitting. The art it contains doesn’t look and feel like anything you’ve ever seen before. It’s immersing and alive and doesn’t bombard the senses as much as slowly, lucidly, brilliantly fill them. It’s legal mind drugs. Glorious.

Advanced Beauty, hands down, full out, is absolutely my favourite project – in any media or genre – for 2008. And one of the most visually arresting and amazing thing I have ever seen in my whole life.

It feels to me like Advanced Beauty is one of those rarest thing in this modern, economy-threatened, bottom line world: a lush, beautiful, sensory-engrossing work of experimental art… just because. Art for the sake of art. Not for commericals, or movie credits, or music videos. But a forum for masters of a flourishing computer-genre new wave of design to experiment and drive their own forefront. It’s stuff like this that will drive the idea of art forward in the digital age. Advanced beauty indeed.

There is no picking favourites with a list of creators like this, but here are some of my favourite snippets, just to entice you. Curator Matt Pyke and his team at Universal Everything were ingenious in the way they marketed and grew buzz: they were generous with HD film clips like these, there was an Advanced Beauty podcast available on iTunes, there was a Facebook group they actually posted shit to. It was truly modern marketing, to a very wired and tech-savvy target audience, for a decidedly modern work of art. And there’s nothing about it not to love.

Mate Steinforth

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Karsten Schmidt

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Carl Burgess

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Pandapanther

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