The Strokes

superb new Strokes video by Warren Fu, excellent excellent excellent!

I still prefer Michel Gondry though...

Simon Robson

FROM MOTIONOGRAPHER.COM

Even if you don’t agree with the arguments put forth in these animations (and the film), they are excellent examples of how the smart confluence of design, animation, sound design and writing—collectively known as motion graphics—can be leveraged to create compelling messages that are hard to ignore. I call these animated nuggets of information and persuasion “visual essays.” Unlike a simple PSA, visual essays intertwine educational messaging with argumentative thrusts. The result is a potent audio-visual cocktail that can, if brewed properly, alter viewers’ states of mind.

Simon has a proven track record of rocking visual essays. His “What Barry Says” still stands as a shining example of the form four years after it was created. (At least I think it was four years ago.) The new animations showcase some of the same clever juxtapositions of type and iconic imagery present in that seminal piece, but there’s a burgeoning level of sophistication and polish present in all of Simon’s work (both commercial and otherwise) that is inspiring to behold.

Simon graciously agreed to answer some questions for us:

How much input did you have on developing the visual ideas? Did Chris Atkins (the director) hand you thoroughly worked out boards or was it just you and the script?

I spent ages developing the boards from scratch. Chris totally trusted me on the back of “What Barry Says” and gave me an absolute carte blanche. It is this that inspired me to take on the project. We actually wrote the VO scripts together, too. Of course, Chris was the prime mover and Becca Elleson fact-checked all that we wrote. But I finally put my degree in politics to use and helped write the VOs for these vignettes!

The storyboard process was long and arduous. I give myself an incredibly hard time over the level of my ideas. They have to be an A++ or they don’t get in. This meant many weeks of head-scratrching and drinking coffee before the right ideas came out. I actually re-wrote some of the boards as the animation was happening. This didn’t make me any friends. But once I saw some ideas in production, they didn’t work and had to be re-written, kind of how they used to write ‘Friends’!!!

Did you have to split your time working on this project while simultaneously working on other (commercial) projects?

No, fortunately and un-fortunately I didn’t get any pitch wins during this period. This left me incredibly dedicated to this project. I got really too deep into it, in a way. And to kind of answer the next question, I gave my directors fee for this project to production to get more animators / illustrators on it. In short, I got paid nothing. I lived unpaid for 4 months. I still owe my girl £3000. Fortunately, I just got a paid gig here at Nexus, which was a huge relief. Now I can go out and by some trendy clothes and stop living on beans on toast!

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I imagine you don’t get paid much for these kinds of projects. What drives you to create things like “What Barry Says” and these new animations?

What drives me? What do I want on my gravestone? “Directed some great ads that sold stuff to people”. Not really. Don’t get me wrong. I really want to do ads, because there is a creative process to be explored (sometimes) and they pay me. But essentially ads are selling things and we’re all a bit too obsessed with buying things, so I’d rather do stuff which I think is important for people to see and take in.

Obviously I’m a bit of a lefty and this comes across in the work I take on, but I’d like my kids (when I have them) to be proud of what I did. Besides, we all learn these crazy skills, don’t we? 3D, 2D, stop-motion, etc. And it would be one MASSIVE shame if we only used them to help sell something as opposed to saying something important. Actually, as a mograph community, with what we know, if we got together in some cohesive movement we could create some amazing marketing for our cause…just a thought.

Danny Yount

I have been watching this for ages, and keep having to dig out the link, so i'm putting it here for reference. It's basically state-of-the art shit. madness!

excellent first five seconds here in particular.

My end-of-the-schoolyear post - Conclusions

This year has been a real eye-opener. I have been 100 times busier than I thought I would be, and feel that I have learned a lot. It's not all totally positive, as this course packs so much in one year, it is quite hard to keep up! (In my case impossible to get a grasp of everything).

I feel I have learned my strengths and weaknesses, and I think I will try to stay on for the 3rd year to get my BA (just as insurance), as I don't plan to go back to education again now if possible in this lifetime (too old!). To avoid unecessesary babble I will do a list of my college related strengths and weaknesses:


Strengths -

1. Good at talking, blogging, communicating (in fact I think I do far too much of this!)
2. I think I have a fairly good eye for design and typography.
3. I am thorough (although this could be a hindrance at times!).
4. I know what I want to do.
5. I work hard, about as hard as I could have this year under my personal circumstances.
6. I take it very seriously.
7. I am quite good at at learning off my back.
8. I am good on the 'building-block' packages such as Photoshop and Illustrator.
9. Paperwork - I can do this well.


Weaknesses -
1. I get stressed.
2. I don't pick up software packages as quickly as I'd like to.
3. Flash - I didn't get enough time on this, and still haven't got as grip on it!
4. Self-confidence. this doesn't come easily to me. I only become confident through practice.
5. I take it very seriously - maybe too seriously!

aims for the next 12 months:

Bearing in mind I think I will try and do that extra year for my BA, thiis makes sense -

1. Refine my goals, start specialising more.
2. Practice, practice, practice!
3. Output, output, output!
4. Do more storyboarding.
5. To become a Photoshop ninja-dude. This will help with the next one...
6. Get into After Effects much more.
7. Look at some bespoke typography. I feel by having some of my own, I will up my worth and individuality etc.
8. Get a Digital SLR and start doing better photography.

that'll do. that's loads. I'm sure the evil-task masters at college will spend the next year throwing curve-balls at us, and I will be busy busy busy. Thank f*ck this years over!

Stephen Watkins

Fantastic reel from Melbourne designer Stephen Watkins here.

I love the mixture of styles, live action, photography, graphic and motion design. The other thing I like to see is different styles. British motion designers can sometimes be a bit aggressive and edgy which can be great, Americans can sometimes be overly slick, so polished it becomes a bit bland, but Australians do this effortlessly laid-back groovy style (obviously these are huge generalisations!).

I love it anyway. Great vibe, and for me, vibe is everything.

Professional Studies Revisted

I have had a really good long think about looking at the outcome of my professional studies and the related pathway for year 2 of this course, and have come to these conclusions:

Whilst I have a small interest in Motion Graphics for the web, I don't feel that I should be getting into a big stress about it. What I am and have been mostly into since the first day I arrived here in September 2006, is good graphic design, and image-making. I know Jon Burton and Martin Pritchard feel that same way; we all dig the motion part, but the majority part of what we're into and want to do is based on good image-making, typography, composition, colour, vibe and hopefully some originality. I am much influenced by Non-Format as I am by Dstrukt.

I really want to work on my layered image making next year, and I would also like to look at some bespoke typography for logo/display use. I also want to get an original spin on what's out there and avoid blandness. I am definitely interested in motion, that animated aspect, but don't really want to spend too much time on the finer ends of action-scripting if it means it's going to take up lots of time. I feel that if I will need to work more on the web than in broadcast I should be able to address this later, as I think it's quite likely that I will stay on for the extra year and get a BA.

I recognise that there is an element of 'Blue Sky Thinking' in my plan for my future career, but I honestly feel that there is little point basing future career choices on the current working environment as it is certain to change by summer 2009. I am seeing motion graphics everywhere now, it's all over the TV, idents, adverts, the news, even in my local Spar, and this will certainly increase. In addition to this, I think that to be good at this you have to be first and foremost, a good designer. This is the foundation and skills can be transferred. I am just going to stick to my guns, and try and work hard but also have some fun with it.

1 Day Brief - Centre for Disability Studies

This is one of the images i did for our 1 day work experience brief for Newi's Centre for Disability Studies.

I enjoyed the experience of doing this one day brief. The task was sat nicely within my current capabilities, as I only really started with all this design stuff 12 months ago (after I was accepted at college). When I deceided I was to leave my old job and take the leap into re-education I quickly went out and bought quite a few graphic design books on basics like layout, composition, typography, ideas etc. I then obtained copies of Photoshop and Illustrator, and set about getting my head around them (as they are quite different from the music production software I was used to like Logic Pro and Ableton Live).

I suppose it is fair to say that prior to starting college I only looked at Graphic design basics, as at that time I didn't think the course would delve into anything deeper so soon like working with Timelines, animation, music-synchronisation etc. I was wrong there! The only thing that helped me prepare was looking at graphic design over the last summer, and I think that is why I found this to be straight-forward. It was just a case of quick research, some roughs on paper, then straight onto Illustrator to get it done, which I was able to on time (in this case).

We later had another 1 day brief, which was a web banner. This was the same kind of idea, but becaise of a lack of both experience and confidence with Flash, I was unable to complete my banner in time, even though I did have a plan. More on this on my end-of-term post.

My First Website

My first website is now live: Kupon (This is the name I am using in place of my own as a brand thing).

The brief was to design and build a portfolio site for college work (and additional work if you wish to include this), and the guidelines specified it had to built with HTML and CSS. This was a big brief, and many elements needing attention; research was undertaken into the various types of websites out there (for example, I never really knew when a site was HTML/CSS, Flash, where Javascript was being used), the way they are organised, web-fonts, optimization, all things that were admittedly restrictive in the initial stages of this project.

The next stage was the design: a few initial ideas were rejected. I wanted a groovy pop art type thing, possibly inspired by this site for Masa in Venezuela , and set out to borrow some of that vibrant, colourful and drop-deal coolness. This didn't work out for various reasons; Masa's site is Flash based, their content is ridiculously good and the whole package is well balanced and rings true. My initial design (based on theirs) was never going to work, and a rethink was needed. I had researched many sites for designers, especially motion graphic artists, and found the best ones were very simple. This could be as simple as a page with some branding, contact details and a link to view or download the showreel. The sites of Lawence Zeegan, Ugo Nonis and Neil Grunshaw are all good examples of this.

The design was reworked with this in mind, but based around my college work as a portfolio. I feel that that this will change, as I think I would like to include other work in future, or more things I fell are good, however this site needed to get done, so I put together an understated and site. The idea is meant to be that the site itself takes a back-seat, and the work shines; although I don't really have work of that calibre (yet!) Particular attention was paid to the grid, typography, web-safe fonts, spacial harmony (and all those other things you get for free when you do a blog). The design was specifically built around the college work I had at thetime, however I have plenty of space within my grid to change this in future, guarenteeing that this site will be good for another year.

The next stage was the coding. HTML and CSS was initially intimidating. It looks like it will be really difficult, but I now realise it's just a case of problem-solving. I think if tweb becomes a speciality there are loads of 'rules' that need to be adhered to, such as accesibility, content-management systems, minimal coding and web standards. This was our first sites, so all of us in our group have tried to incorporate 'good practice' and the latest web-trends. The practical lessons for this brief were very good, comprehensive enough to get thinking CSS, but as an added measure and on the recommendation of NWSAD's resident web-geek in residence Tim Makin, I purchased Patrick Griffith's book HTML DOG, which is very good, and is less than 6 months old so has most of the latest web-fads in.

I think it could have been possible to get other people to do little bits of the coding for me, but I want to be able to keep doing websites. I have my label and club night, Curfew, which urgently needs attention, and over the summer I plan to use this as my muse, with plans for a customised word-press blog, a portfolio type site (possibly in Flash) and plently of graphics, web banners etc. This will keep my hand in with web, as I will not be specialising in web-design. My mate Andy Olley at Bruce Dunlop doesn't do web, and hasn't done for the last 6 years for his day-job, but he is not adverse to knocking out the odd site on the side for a bit of extra cash and to keep his hand in. His sites are simple, but look great as he is good on the design side, and it works for him. I like the idea of this, and plan to do the same.

To conclude my feedback on the site, I would say that I was basically happy with the site as first attempt. The site hasn't been tested in IE (any version) yet, and there are still a few bugs, but I know I will be able to fix this. I also plan to adapt the site to incorporate more flexibility for adding more content over the next twelve months.

More Typography Video

Another one. After Effects etc. It's good though.

Type and Motion

a clever and compelling trip through design history, from Mucha’s elaborate compositions in the late 19th century all the way up to the 3D-dominated glossiness of the present day.

Oliver "Twist" Gondry

I am a huge fan of Michel Gondry and his brother Oliver. Thier work has been consistantly technically mind-boggling, yet the result is always a human, always true to life in some way. I quite like 3d and vfx stuff, but only really in this way (most maya type 3d kids cartoons are horrible).

This spot shows how much input Oliver must have in many of Michel's videos.