Psyop Signs Oscar-Nominated Pixar Director Doug Sweetland
March 17, 2025
Framestore CD/director Mike McGee leads an intrepid crew into weightlessness aboard a Go ZeroG plane to, well… flavor some water with Robinsons SQUASH’D thru Iris Worldwide.
McGee: “When we were inside the ‘vomit comet’ things got out of control pretty quickly: bits of our equipment floated away, cables floated up in front of the camera, cameras pointed in the wrong direction and the crew spun around uncontrollably feeling nauseous.”
“We had a team of eight up on the plane with a Go Pro camera each and two high-speed cameras shooting at 2K to allow us to slow down and zoom in on the all-important mixing shot. With only 12 takes to get everything we needed and only 15 seconds of weightlessness at a time, it was a formidable task.”
McGee: “When we were inside the ‘vomit comet’ things got out of control pretty quickly: bits of our equipment floated away, cables floated up in front of the camera, cameras pointed in the wrong direction and the crew spun around uncontrollably feeling nauseous.”
“We had a team of eight up on the plane with a Go Pro camera each and two high-speed cameras shooting at 2K to allow us to slow down and zoom in on the all-important mixing shot. With only 12 takes to get everything we needed and only 15 seconds of weightlessness at a time, it was a formidable task.” [Watch]
Director/animator Clément Morin re-imagines Angus Wall’s now-classic 2011 “Game of Thrones” opening sequence to reinforce HootSuite’s prediction of the coming Social Media Winter caused by the “battles being fought between many social networks, who are building walls and blocking access between their [Watch]
Hornet director Yves Geleyn reveals to Stash readers his design and narrative goals behind the powerful new 90-second PSA for States United to Prevent Gun Violence:
“Most commercials would cut on the gunshot, but we felt strongly that we should show it. If it were live-action, broadcasting regulations would have stopped it. Animation allowed us to show the whole scene. People expect the climax even less because of the medium.
“Once we settled on using animation, the key to heightening the emotional impact is in the simplicity of the piece. Less is more. Your brain fills the gaps. You understand that you are in a kid’s room, but it is not filled with too many objects. It is about the mood. This gives more room for the characters to inhabit each scene.
“The character designs themselves are graphic. They have human proportions but in an illustrated way. It is about striking a balance between lovable characters while keeping them realistic so people can project themselves. The family also does not have any sort of key defining characteristics, which helps make them relatable to a wider range of people.
“Speaking in terms of lighting, it is designed in such a way that it points to areas we want you to focus on (something Renaissance painters used frequently). The lighting is sharp. There are no gradients. There are no shadows, just highlights. The lighting helps to build the scene.”
Facts about kids and guns in the US:
• 1.5 million American children live in homes with unlocked and loaded firearms.
• Every day at least 6 children age 0 to 18 are injured in an unintentional shooting.
• 75% of gun shot injuries to children under ten that are serious enough to require hospitalization are due to unintentional shootings. [Watch]
The Japanese delicacy known as hachinoko (baby bee larvae) lends its name to this track from electronic duo Simian Mobile Disco brought to life in a “3D-animated whirlwind of the surreal and humorous” by London creative agency DesignStudio and AD/designer Jack Featherstone. [Watch]
Beautiful exploratory frames from UK studio FutureDeluxe (London/Brighton) created as branding experiments in for Nvidia who asked the crew to development ideas “to demonstrate the computational power and creative potential” of their visual computing technology. “The thread images were created in Softimage and 3ds Max whilst the others in C4D with thinking particles, then rendered in Vray.” [Watch]
Garson Yu and the crew at yU+co in LA handled concept, design and time-lapse CG animation in this short/sweet open for the new HBO comedy from Mike Judge where “various tech companies start up, expand, collapse, and quickly get supplanted by newer, fast-growing companies.” [Watch]
And the Award for Best Performance by a Deaf Blue Monster in a Music Video goes to Oh Yeah Wow director Darcy Prendergast who spent three months learning the Auslan sign interpretation of the song’s lyrics then endured a 26-hour shoot on a scorching 40C-degree day after only an hour’s sleep. Co-directed by Andrew Goldsmith. [Watch]
Sometimes all the elements of a production work so well together it just makes you wanna watch again. In the case of “Cooks Range” for Lurpak butter products thru W+K London, those elements include: Blink director Dougal Wilson, DoP Stephen King Roach, editor: Joe Guest @ Final Cut, the VFX/post team at MPC, sound designer Aaron Reynolds @ Wave Studios, and a hot young composer named Richard Strauss.
The campaign also includes delicious print assets like the one below featuring photography by Blink Art film-maker and photographer Ryan Hopkinson.
Inspired by the work of M.C. Escher, Japanese woodblock prints and a love of architecture, Monument Valley from ustwo took the iOS gaming world by storm on it’s release last week with a combination of minimal character design, gorgeous pallets and immersive, unhurried gameplay (the total absence of in-app [Watch]
London’s weareseventeen tackles an animated Easter broadcast design package for BT by “focusing on the beauty of Springtime” and avoiding the holiday cliches. But so much 3D beauty comes at a price according to creative director and co-founder Steve Simmonds, “Some of the frames took 22 hours to render on this one, probably our biggest technical wrangle to date.”
[Watch]
Paris graphic and motion design company NAKED teams with ROOF in New York to create 45 richly detailed and lovingly rendered 3D broadcast bumpers for France’s TF1 network. The five-month transatlantic collaboration happened over a cloud-based pipeline built with tools like Podio.com and Amazon allowing the [Watch]
Blacklist/Paranoid director Cisma (Denis Kamioka) whisks us forward in time to document life on the streets of Brazil in 2044 and returns with this 10-minute opus for MC Criolo complete with eerie future tech courtesy of CLAN vfx in São Paulo. Check the following interview with the director to learn how this project [Watch]
Glassworks Amsterdam director Rudiger Kaltenhauser puts a frigid 3D-animated twist on the extreme macro world of fabric technology (and David Beckham’s skin) for Adidas thru the Meanwhile agency. Check Kaltenhauser’s G-STAR ‘Art of RAW’ spot for more CG macro magic plus Skrillex and a skeleton dog. Audio: Kaiser Sound Studios. [Watch]
Ambitious and snappy new CG “Coming Soon” intro now hitting Scotiabank cinemas across Canada produced in stereoscopic 3D by creative directors Anthony Scott Burns, Abdul Mohamud and the Topix crew in Toronto thru agency Capital C. [Watch]
