There is a branch of commercial design out there now being roughly categorized as ‘motion design,’ which in almost all instances describe ‘motion graphic design,’ a screen-based artform used in tv bumpers and commercials, flash-heavy interactive websites, and street signage (check out Motionographer for good coverage of this emerging practice). But designer Ben Hopson wants to apply an aesthetic of motion in physical, product-based applications:

My goal is to add beauty and interest to products by investigating the different ways that movement can be designed. While designers have numerous techniques and tools at their disposal to improve the appearance of objects, when it comes to creating ways for objects to move through space, designers are often at a loss.

To remedy this problem, I have developed methods for sketching kinetic concepts and a working vocabulary to discuss them. What you will find recorded here are my initial investigations into this approach to product design.

Check out his work here.

[via Core77]

 

I had come across this animation before, but infosthetics recently posted on it so it got foregrounded for me again. It’s a charming Maya visualization of John Coltrane’s short jazz sketch, Giant Steps, rendered and animated using an appropriate architecture metaphor. Writes the author of the piece, Michal Levy:

Coltrane made a major break through with his album “Giant Steps” in the year 1959. It was the first time in the history of Jazz music that someone based his music on symmetrical patterns, which stemmed from a mathematical division of the musical scale.

The structural approach of John Coltrane to music is associated with architectural thinking. The musical theme defines a space and the musical improvisation is like someone drifting in that imaginary space.

Hi-res flash version can be view on Levy’s site here.

 

Infosthetics also linked to a more diagrammatic illustration of the Giant Step’s tonal structure here.

A nice post today on Motionographer likening the experiential and technological melding of web / interactive with motion graphics design as Kid Convergence, the unformed but quickly maturing love child between two distinct (at least until recently) but lovingly compatible mediums.

The post offers up two recent examples to underscore the convergence: Designgraphik’s (designer Mike Young’s — one half of the excellent YWFT – ongoing web experiment) — a mostly linear flash and video clickthru experience – and the Nike Air campaign minisite (a showcase of Nike’s upcoming line of 180 and 360 performance kicks), employing a VJ-like keyboard interface to activate psychedelic video effects, produced by DUMBO-based Big Spaceship.

This site by Fallon for Travelers, a home insurance company, takes a structurally bland premise — a web-based quiz on home security — and significantly sexifies it with a seamlessly integrated flash, 3D, and auditory experience. The art direction and technical execution are top shelf. Beautiful stuff.

 

Snowboarding whiz Shaun White (winner of the gold at Turin earlier this year) does a composite-heavy — no green screen! – spot for HP.

[link via Motionographer]

Red, the most goofy and whimsical of the generally amazing Adicolor motion shorts … Brought to us by The Directors Bureau (aka Roman Coppola and Andy Bruntel)

And if you, like me, spend a lot of bloodshot hours staring at Flash in a general state of despair and hallucinatory disorientation (debugging actionscript at four in the morning is AWESOME), then you will find this animation most amusing. For it poses the question: as bad as you have it, how do you think Flash feels? Check out Animator vs. Animation here.

(Those in the know will recognize and appreciate this clever updating of Osvaldo Cavandoli’s iconic La Linea cartoons …)

 

Like a great many people have done recently, I saw An Inconvenient Truth tonight and was shattered.

In it slow methodical science takes unusually persuasive and passionate form. It is truth-telling at its noblest and most highly effective. The enormous, planetary threat that Al Gore has been flogging since his college and congressional days (the latter of which was a 17-year tenure he began at age 27) go beyond the politicization that the right has tactically and instinctively — and predictably — resorted to in attacking the film; rather, global warming is, as Gore himself says, not a political issue, but an urgently moral one. That so many people have been packing seats to see it, and that the Republican counterargument is sounding more and more shrill and insane to more and more people by the minute signals, perhaps, that a tipping point in our collective consciousness has finally been reached. Whether or not we can make it past the next century still remains to be seen. If we don’t, will it perhaps be because we’ve reached the Rapture after all? A fossil-fuel-depleted, water-logged, carbon-soaked one albeit? Now that we seem to have eeked past 6/6/06, all bets are off …

I’ve said it before, but just to reiterate … Gore in 2008! We need you ever so desperately now … 

On a lighter, but nevertheless related tip, check out this ingenious and entertaining (and alas, depressing) animation called A Bad Case of the Humans …

 

Here’s a site that points to the future by remixing bits of the past — in this case, old, Victorian lithographic images from Dover Publishing (at least that’s whom the designer/programmer/animator Caleb Johnston credits for the illustrators).

The site’s navigation scheme is fairly straightforward and idiot-proof. In a nutshell, roll over something clickable and then click on it. The meat of the experience, moreover, is what happens upon the click, which is per usual a swirling, spinning, throbbing, flashing rush of animal parts, plant matter, calligraphic type, women in petticoats, and Olde English gentlemen under tophats. The experience pretty deftly evokes the obsessive thematic delirium that grips you in depths of a drug trip. Speaking theoretically, of course. Ha.

The compositional and motion work are really astonishing, both aesthetically vivid and technical seamless. Given Flash 8’s video alpha and clip blurring cabilities, it’s difficult — and probably pointless, really – to tell, in several transitory instances, whether Johnston is employing some expert tweening or playing pre-rendered video. That ambiguity, however, belies a clear trend towards the convergence of rendered and pre-rendered animation on the web (currently represented by the respective capabilities of After Effects and Flash), a convergence which will be realized soon enough. The two factors that determine how soon that is are 1) how well Macromedia will integrate with Adobe’s mother borg, and 2) how that integration aligns with the rate of advance in home computing processing power. What say you, Moore?

Anyway, strong, strong work!

(ps. and the sound design — by Dallas Johnston — is boss too)

In my latest hiatus several animations / music vids / motion graphics pieces have accumulated in my craw. Without further ado …

Australian artist Paul Robertson made this outrageous animation (drawn GIF-style — i.e., frame by frame – in ImageReady over the course of several, no doubt carpal-tunnel stricken, months) evocatively titled ‘Pirate Baby’s Cabana Battle Street Fight 2006,’ in the spirit of the old school horizontal fighting scrollers such as Double Dragon or Bad Dudes. Though things in Double Dragon nor Bad Dudes certainly never got this hectic …

Watch the video here.

[via BoingBoing]

Better in concept than upon execution perhaps, but still impressive. Lorenzo Fonda (an Italian animator with a seriously irritating portfolio site) attached static frames to dominos, and tracked them as they fell, forming the animation. Well, that was the idea anyway.

Watch the video here.

[via Motionographer]

I came across a link to the Swedish motion graphics house Pistachios a little while ago. Some freshness surely is to be found; take a look here.

The smart and ballsy British director Michael Winterbottom (who directed 24 Hour Party People, Code 46, and the art-porn dealio 9 Songs) directed this video for the Boards of Canada track ‘Davyan Cowboy.’ There is no Maya / After Effects / Flame pyrotechnics here; Winterbottom goes for the timeless and the sublime through the splicing-together of old film stock. In the first half we watch a aerial dive from a hot air balloon that looks like it’s floating somewhere in the upper stratosphere; and we end up surfing in the azure Jaws of an endless North Shore summer … 

Grok the video here.

[thanks Mira!]

UPDATE: Thanks to the latest issue RES (July/August 2006, Vol.9, No.4), I now know that this video was put together by Melissa Olson, not Winterbottom. Terribly sorry about the mix up …

LA motion graphics house Bl:nd directed this music video for Gnarls Barkley, aka the recent collaboration between R&B guy Cee-Lo and rising producer Dangermouse (of Grey Album and The Mouse and the Mask fame).

The song is called ‘Crazy.’ Accordingly, Bl:nd conjures hallucinatory formations out of Rorschach inkblots over the course of the track, often in brilliantly unexpected ways. The idea is strong, and the fluidity of the animation / compositing work is unbelievable. The video nails it on so many levels. The track, too, is buttah …

Watch the video here.

[via Coolhunting]

This was a high resolution motion series of bumpers that Psyop created for MTV’s new HD music video station. A discussion of the creative and production process, as well as hi-res stills from the video, in this article in Dexigner. 

View the video here.

Diesel’s new Spring/Summer 2006 campaign, made by Barcelona shop Vasava, breaks all aesthetic restraint and goes for broke. While one might better appreciate the rigor that Psyop and Bl:nd employ above, it is still easy on the eyes.

View the piece here.

[via Motionographer]

Some recent scrapes from Newstoday … 

 

Partizan, the French production company of music videos and television spots, recently launched a new site. Its motion graphics sister company, Partizan Lab, has done likewise. You can view videos and animations from Partizan’s extensive roster of artist / directors. You may have to set aside a spare afternoon to do it with, though …

 

The FWA has conveniently listed its Top Twenty list of photography websites since 2000. When cold-browsing flickr doesn’t cut it … Sometimes you need a sexy interface to get you in the mood.

 

The new campaign to get people to drink the cow includes two fun and outrageous flash sites, based on the notion of extraterrestrial civilizations running low on milk, and suspiciously, the corresponding phenomenon of cow abductions here on earth. This is a positive development for the dairy folks, if only because their erstwhile Got Milk? milk-on-upper-lip was a little disturbing and off-putting, at least me. After all, if you really think about it, drinking milk (I’m not talking about eating ice cream or cheese, but drinking milk) is a fairly revolting act. Better to market liquid animal product by wrapping some high-flying concepts and flashy interactivity at it, rather than emphasizing the physical consumption of it.

Attik launched a new portfolio site documenting their thoroughly beautiful body of work. The site is a little annoying to navigate, and the copy is client-directed and adver-speaky (then again, who reads these kinds of sites anymore?), but nuggets of goodness can be found throughout. Perhaps my favorite feature is the context-appropriate wallpapers, a smart and uncommon idea, and which are gorgeously rendered.

Some web-magic to rub your belly late into the night …

1. Justin Swindle’s Soulwire is possibly one of my favorite portfolio sites of all-time, with a few qualifications. Some aspects of the interface sacrifice usability in favor of slickness — for example, the text-cycling gets a little old, and mousing over constantly scrolling, 10-pixel high buttons (you are essentially chasing small, moving targets) requires a little too much dexterity and coordination when it really needs to be about a buttery-smooth browsing process – but there are simply too many flourishes here that endear my own stylistic predilections, such as the creamy motion design, the sweet, crispy rollover sounds, and ahh, that wallpaper background (ooo, that changes color!).

If anything, a good incentive to get my shit together and update diametrik, now approaching 1.5 years of age, which is practically geriatric in web years …

2. I get the Schoolhouse Rock reference (I think …), but that’s really where my understanding begins and ends. In terms of its WTF?-bonafides, Kid America Club might properly belong in the webzen category per the previous post, but it’s too heavy on art direction and production to qualify as ‘zen.’ Prepare to be befuddled.

3. So dry, it’s parched; Lifelong Friendship Society, where commercial motion graphics meets Dada.

 

When branding kills …

I saw these two at AIGANY’s MOVE Conference last spring, and they are clowns. Whereas most of the designers on hand (which included Golan Levin and MK12) sat, presented, and actually discussed their work, Friends With You appeared on stage in Gumby-like costumes, ran and jumped around in circles, threw t-shirts into the audience, shouted into voxcoders (annoying after the third — no, first – time), lit firecrackers (which almost got them kicked out by security for obvious fire hazard reasons), and generally behaved like total freaks. I think they were going for a psychedelic, neo-hippie, groovy, ’Happening’-ish vibe, but their presentation/performance came off instead as a bad caffeine buzz.

It’s hard, and probably irrelevant, to describe what it is they do, but based on their MOVE spectacle my guess is it’s somewhere inside the fuzzy locus described by sculpture, graphic/web/motion design, toy-making, and performance art.

For me the jury may be out on whether the loudness and insanity translate to brilliance, but they certainly get marks for effort. In any case, this goofy video, from their recent Cloud City exhibit in Miami, is pretty charming, and it gets at their whacked out M.O. well enough.

[via Newstoday]

 

This was posted by the venerable Brazilian motion graphics designer Nando Costa in K10k, who said ‘This is probably one of the best animations I have seen in a really, really long time.’ Coming from him, that is tall praise indeed …

By a French outfit called 90degrees.

View the piece here.

Some video from our big Asia extravaganza in November.

The first is footage from the Shanghai airport magnetic levitation (or ‘maglev’) train. This piece of German engineering cost the Chinese government over a billion dollars, and for that it covers only 30 kms of distance from a pick-up station in Pudong to the airport. Although it covers that distance pretty fast — the trip takes a mere 7 minutes. Here we are speeding over the Shanghai boonies at 430 km/h.

The second video was taken from a strategically positioned camera on a lazy susan, and it serves to document the cast of a very festive dinner banquet in Taipei. We were dining in a restaurant that served Beijing-style cuisine (which I unfortunately could not partake; I was relegated all week to eating warm porridge due to sort of stomach flu), and it served as one of several venues for our mini-family reunion in the city. Order of appearance: me, Meredith, my sister Yee, dad’s stepmother, mom’s mother (happy birthday grandma!), dad’s cousin (once-removed), dad, mom, Aunt Wei’s husband, our waitress (who makes a seredipitous appearance in the frame), Aunt Wei, Aunt Sophia, and Brian (dad’s stepmother’s adopted son).

More photos from the Asia trip here.

 

A hot promo video (for the Pro X Fade Crossfader).