blink + tomas mankovsky: sorry I’m late.

I see some people bitching online about how many stop motion videos there are and I think they should shut up. Sure, the whole stop motion thing has been really popular lately, and I think it’s for two reasons:

a) If done well, it’s really fucking awesome. b) It can be cheap, and is an amazing technique for low-budget or up-and-coming artists to create cool motion design.

Plus, if you’ve ever seen how gruelingly, excrutiatingly, painfully long it takes to create, it’s amazing how much love has to be put into it. As long as it’s being used to create something true and beautiful, it shouldn’t matter how many times you’ve seen it before. That would be like saying Impressionism is played out because Manet did it all before Monet. And, if you said that, you’d be an idiot.

There’s always room for more of something awesome.

Besides just being generally hot, “Sorry I’m Late” is even more impressive when you realize that Blink’s Tomas Mankovsky created it with stop motion, shooting a bunch of stills on a gym floor from a camera suspended from the ceiling. That, my friends, is bad ass. No matter how many times you’ve seen it.

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Via Rocketboom

zeitguised: peripetics.

I really love it when something is created with the bravery to not necessarily be so easily figured out. Or even figured out with effort. “Peripetics” is skillful and visually mind-blowing and doesn’t make a fucking bit of sense. Even better, it’s not trying to. Art truly catapults itself in moments where it puts complete onus on the viewer to participate in the act of determining its meaning. Lush and non-liner, we are given moments of beauty and complexity and wonder; a mood is created. A feeling. What does it mean? Not that it’s necessarily meant to “mean” anything at all… but that answer is completely up to you.

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Like six dreams brought to visual and sonic life, “Peripetics” (its full title is “Peripetics or The installation of an irreversible axis on a dynamic timeline”) is a suite of six ideas created by animation dreamers Zeitguised for the Zirkel Gallery. The Zeitguised site says the piece “entails six imaginations of disoriented systems that take a catastrophic turn, including the evolution of educational plant-body-machine models and liquid building materials.”

Sound design is by Michael Fakesch, who also collaborated on one of my fave motion design pieces ever, “Blackbird.” There is also some great insight into the creation of “Peripetics”, from Zeitguised themselves, over at Motionographer.

A testament to the quality of the CGI is how sharp just these stills look all on their own. Even removed from the context of the motion itself, each glimpse is killer. Visual universes unto themselves…