Crush Dances to the Edge with Ben Shirinian
Toronto’s Crush takes on the supporting VFX role in this austere and elegant piece set to “Avalanche” by Leonard Cohen from Canadian director Ben Shirinian and choreographer/dancer Guillaume Côté produced thru Shirinian’s Toronto studio KLP with a grant from Bravo!FACT.
Shirinian says Lost in Motion II is, “about showcasing a universal take on where any artist retreats to in their mind when they expose themselves and their work. I wanted to create a setting that truly embodied and visually represented feelings of vulnerability, loneliness, danger, and beauty all at once.
“Guillaume and I came up with the physical environment of a lonely, eroding cliff top in the sky surrounded by looming, full, dark, clouds and prominent wind, rain, thunder and lighting, to represent the inner turmoil and feelings experienced by an artist.”
Watch the BTS here…
Oskar Wrangö Smokes Out Rdio
Up to now, Rdio’s series of weekly new music art spots consisted of brilliant but bite-size 15-second confections. That changed yesterday with the release of this minute-long piece mixing ambitious in-camera effects and digital post from innovative Swedish director Oskar Wrangö for the Alt-J track Dissolve Me (Ben Lovett Remix). [Read more]
Pushing Strength in Numbers
Toronto directing collective Common Good teams with local design and post talent Andrew Vucko and Nicolas Girard for this sweaty mograph look at a new product from Push Strength that tracks all aspects of your workout. Andrew Vucko: “The production turnaround was about a month, direct to client, so I was quite proud at what we were able to accomplish on the post production end.” [Read more]
Pixelstick: Join the Light Painting Revolution
Only 13 days into the kickstarter campaign for their magical light painting kit called Pixelstick, Duncan Frazier and Stephen McGuigan (aka Bitbanger Labs in Brooklyn) have raised over 3.5 times their goal of $110K. The reason for the enthusiasm? Pixelstick yanks light painting forward into new, seriously disruptive, WTF territory [Read more]
Blinkink and Hornet: John Lewis “The Bear and the Hare”
Blinkink and Hornet directors Elliot Dear and Yves Geleyn worked with former Disney animator Aaron Blaise (The Lion King and Pocahontas) to create the latest landmark holiday heart-warmer for UK department store John Lewis. The two-minute spot, combining classic hand animation with miniature sets, required six months and a reported $1.6M to produce.
The track features the return of Lily Allen covering Keane’s ‘Somewhere Only We Know’. Agency: Adam & Eve DDB.
Lexus “Swarm” via KMel and The Mill
If you were at the Saatchi&Saatchi New Director showcase in Cannes in 2012 you no doubt were as agape as I was at the opening: a dazzling quadrotor ballet of light and motion. KMel Robotics, the Philadelphia crew behind that spectacle just finished this Lexus spot via agency CHI & Partners.
Working with Rogue Films director Sam Brown and The Mill, the team built custom mini-quadrotors as mischievous beady-eyed characters influenced by the Lexus design aesthetics. Flight patterns for the Vancouver shoot were input from 3D pre-vis co-ordinates supplied by The Mill.
Jorge Montiel, head of animation at The Mill: “Even though most of the shots had been done with real quads in motion, the animation team had to work on animating all the quads, for every shot before hand. The reason behind this was to add personality and character to these little quadrotors which was something Sam wanted from the very beginning of the project. Their movements were choreographed in 3D and then transferred by KMel.
“The huge amount of technical detail was crucial to be able to animate these devices properly without having crashes or strange behaviors. Distance, acceleration, speed and the physics behind the helices were the main parameters we had to keep in mind whilst animating them. The way the quadrotors move is very agile but they also have a lot of limitations, which caused a higher level of difficulty when trying to make them expressive.”
Watch these two behind the scenes clips for more details:
