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.”

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Via Motionographer

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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.

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Via Ventilate

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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:

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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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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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david o’reilly + jon klassen: black lake.

There are times when you fall in love faster than you thought you were capable of. All your old signals fade and your plans re-arrange without a word. Your stars align in brand new ways and all the nights you had designed become a dream for your days. Your heart expands and for a time your reality is married to the possibility of everything you can envision. Like a message in a bottle, gently nudged from your shore, this vision travels and, if you’re lucky, the person you love picks it up and carries it with you.

Sweetly, without warning, you construct your potential and in this moment your future and your present melt together. Into an instant eventual, an immediate inevitable. A second where  the possibility of love stretches before you like an ocean and you travel through your imagination; vast and epic and filled with hope, the way each wave yearns to curl up and crash back into the same waters it was first pulled away from.

This is that feeling.

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Following their work together on the video for U2’s “I’ll Go Crazy If I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight”, the heart-achingly exquisite “Black Lake” is a collaboration between one of my favourite directors, David O’Reilly, and Jon Klassen and it’s beautiful.

Via Motionographer

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hydra: homunculus.

“Homunculus” is a bizarrely absurd twist on two concepts; one ancient and one psychological. The first of an annual series of experimental shorts from HumbleTV’s in-house team Hydra, “Homunculus” begins as a study of things too small to be seen and too slow to be known. Air and gas and bacteria that slowly rot, pulling at the molecules and fibres of the natural world until they decay. Time, slowly pulling away at the insides of everything alive.

After that, things get really nasty.

Described by Hydra as “…taking its title from the Latin word for “Little Human”, the piece is an associative mashup between the two concepts behind the word: The first being middle-age alchemical beliefs that “little men” could be spontaneous generated from dead or decaying matter.  The second being Carl Jung’s usage as a personification of pure id.  These ideas, combined with our love of Dutch still life’s “beautiful decay,” sowed the seeds for this unique little monster of a film.”

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They began be sealing off an entire still life inside a plexiglass box and used multiple DSLRs shot a frame every 5 minutes for 11 days to document the slow (and noble!) rot. After that the entire Hydra team spent 4 months, from character conception to scoring, to complete the final HD short.

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alex roman: the third and the seventh.

It’s still messing with my head, but this entire gem of a video is CGI. Like a vision brought into a reality so startlingly real that it almost can’t be believed… yet, there it is. The amount of detailed work that director Alex Roman would have had to put into “The Third and The Seventh” boggles me. His dedication and deft eye is matched only by his extraordinary vision.

An examination of the way we visually record the physical world we live in, chronicling our 3-dimensional reality through a 2-dimensional visual, “The Third and The Seventh” is  a fantastic glimpse into a future world of impossible beauty. Or, rather, hopefully through the inspiration of his vision, a world of possible beauty.

Unlike a grand fantasy, impressive but unattainable, Roman’s detailed, modern, sparse film seems dreamy, yet so close to the truth as to almost be real. It’s like an understandable improvement, an attainable evolution into a world of architectural, environmental, intellectual, elemental, and ecological fusion. A place where all of our potential has been realized.

To me, it feels like fleeting second immediately after you’ve woken from a dream, where for a moment that dream is your entire, thrilling truth.

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Now that you’ve seen it, can you believe that none of that is real footage? This isn’t VFX, it’s fully (painstakingly, amazingly) created with a mix of 3dsmax, Vray, After Effects, and Premiere.

For proof, watch Roman’s compositing vid, where he’s show us his process.

Via Feed

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eb hu: lucky.

I’m like a kid in a candy store today. Scanning through my usual go-to sites is turning up a treasure trove of new work from some of my favourite directors from right before the holidays.

I’m going to start sounding really superlative, but after Robert Seidel’s “_Grau” yesterday, here we have another work from the creator of one of my favourite pieces of motion design ever. Works like these are the reasons I started blogging, so this is emotional stuff for me here.

I first discovered director and animator EB Hu with his breathtaking “Josie’s Lalaland.” Quite simply, it’s one of the most simple, sincere, and exquisite works of art I’ve ever seen.

Like “Josie’s Lalaland”, “Lucky” is noble and compassionate. Hu is not afraid to confront our fears, demons, and ugliest deeds, but does so in such a delicate but impacting way. Clean lines, emotive visuals, sharp edges, and everything in perfect balance to let the emotion of what we’re seeing take focus. It’s the vigour of his subtle touch that strikes me. His work compels us, in dignified and glorious tones, to remember that all life is to be cherished, and, without scolding, reminds us that it is our own lives that are without value if we allow ourselves to forget this.

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And if, for some reason, though I can’t imagine what it would be, you didn’t click on “Josie’s Lalaland” earlier, here it is as well, because it’s simply too beautiful for you to not see. I will not forgive myself if you don’t watch this video, right here, right now.

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Via Motionographer

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