thank you for smoking

Watched a rather brilliant movie last night called Thank you for smoking about a charismatic pro-smoking lobbyist. I was captivated by the opening credits created by shadow play studio. It is a celebration of tobacco products and their packaging. If you love anything to do with typography this will be interesting to you. What is great is that the cartons appear to be in chronological order so you see the older packaging first. It is interesting to see use of typeface and how it differed throughout different decades.

TITLE SEQUENCE lo res version below | hi res version here


trailer here

pilobolus

So to keep on the Oscars theme for a little bit longer, Sunday night saw interspersed between Oscars shenanegans with the incredible shadow puppeteers/ dance troupe Pilobolus. They entertained us with their interpretation of various Oscar nominated movies to quite incredible effect. I just love anything like this. You are suddenly given not only 2D but monochrome as your medium. Your pallette is your limbs and body and the canvas is the projection you make. The music used really accentuated the movement. This was definitely an Oscars highlight for me :)

scorcese wins

A great win for Scorcese last night. He was owed, true. But he won for a deserving movie. My blog predictions all held good with the exception of Alan Arkin winning for Best Supporting Actor but to be fair this category was wide open (however, strangely a couple of hours before I switched to Babel for Best Picture having the horror of Crash winning still ringing in my ears.....despite having said that The Departed will win Best Picture and Director since seeing the movie..... ho hum).

All in all a good night with Ellen settling in to do a great job of holding her own and entertaining the crowd of A-listers. She will be back I'm sure. Also good song performances from the Dreamgirls with Beyonce being surprisingly good and Jennifer a little nervous (bless her... having just won for Best Supporting Actress). Also great shadow puppetry interspersed the proceedings (hopefully someone will post clips to youtube so I can post them as they really were quite good). 13 correct predictions out of a possible 24. Not the best year for me and well done to Dean for winning. How did everyone else do? Post a message and let me know about your Oscar night....

everybody loves you oscar

iFilm has recently added a new category to their listings: an oscars page. I have long been an advocate of iFilm over the far inferior youTube as it generally has the best animation and short film selection. Their oscars page has loads of clips and trailers from many of the best picture nominees. Having failed to see Letters from Iwo Jima I may well use this to catch up on those oscar worthy clips at some point. Dean and Lee there's a couple of good clips from Babel there too which I don't think you've seen yet.

Have a great oscars night y'all and may the best man or woman win..... or more likely actually be forced to slap a smile on as the award goes to some undeserving misfit. My predictions....

Best pic: Departed
Best dir: Scorcese
Best Actor: Forest Whitaker
Best Actress:Helen Mirren
Best S. Actor: Eddie Murphy
Best S. Actress: Jennifer Hudson

CDX

Oh you've gotta love the BBC. This is a great example of interactive design. Linking a history programme with an online game this is a great way to learn about the past. A heady mix of noir and fiendishly difficult puzzles this is sure to keep you guessing for a while yet. I didn't have time to delve too deep into this one but if you do please send me screenshots and narrative points and I'll be sure to post them.

"A sacrificial blade forged at the birth of the Roman empire holds the key to an ancient and bloody conspiracy that threatens to erupt into the present day.

Stranded in 21st century Tunis, Adam Foster is plunged into a world of greed, betrayal and murder. But who has the blade, and can the killers be stopped?

Unlock the mystery in this unique interactive-video adventure."

Play the game here.

doll face

This movie haunts me with the gorgeous character design. A doll face attached to a spider-like contraption is trapped in a trunk yet yearns to know more about the world. A television is it's link to understanding itself and it struggles to copy the face it sees onscreen. Brilliantly animated and a great, simple story. Enjoy!

gilbert and george

I went to see the new Gilbert & George exhibition at the Tate modern yesterday and what a treat it was. These two East London eccentrics have been creating art since the 60s and it was fascintating to see the progression of their work throughout four formative decades. Starting out with their early sketch installations where they draw charcoal on huge canvases to depict rural scenes, pub interiors and getting drunk in Shoreditch. Before moving on to their more recognizable works using photographic images blown up to huge sizes. They started out by using black and white photography as their medium often hanging images of themselves alongside London street scenes and images of the natural world. The juxtaposition of textures were just as important as the placement of these images in conjunction with each other. As the pair progressed they started introducing red as a theme and their 'Bloody Life' series depicts their dark and angry sides as the young men explored their alcoholic natures.

As their work evolved, the use of colour became more and more evident culminating in the highly graphic works we know from the 80s. Impeccably dressed in suits, Gilbert and George feature in many of their pieces often considering themselves as the art. Fusing themes of sex and bodily waste, death and aids, hateful graffiti and religious tones, the pair were often provocative. But for me I also 'got' their dark sense of humour. Totally deadpan they are and yet if you look closely at their work there are details that can be overlooked (pubic lice, close up magnifications of semen, and garishly coloured 'turds' are some examples). The exhibition was vast and some of their works span entire walls. Huge murals of colour featuring the youth of the day mixed in with imagery of blossoming nature. Often the artists themselves are featured as huge imposing heads looking over their subjects almost god-like. In later works they appeared either nude or as full length people but smaller in size almost as though they have been shrinking in importance over the years. It really was great fun exploring the minds of these two artistic geniuses. "Art for all". Go see it. On now until May 7th 2007. The Tate Modern.

multi-touch

Check out this unbelieveable demo of multi-touch software. If you thought the technology behind the iPhone was cutting edge you won't believe the tech behind this GUI (graphic user interface). I think that interacting using your hands and arms like this would be tiring over time. But it definitely has some interesting applications for the real world. Jared, in the agency, had a great idea that this tech could be used by doctors to perform remote operations. They could be half-way across the world and yet be able to control the operation using techniques that are more human than using tiny remote controls. I also think it is interesting to be able to expand and explore images onscreen using gestures similar to the 'pinch' technique shown in the iPhone. The exploration of Google earth using this technique is also really cool.

red

Great to see people are still making these furiously addictive games. This is a great take on the classic shoot em up asteroids style game. Great use of actionscripted physics along with a fast paced soundtrack make this one of the best flash games I have played in a LONG while.

Play the game here.

google domination

This was sent round the agency last week and it scared the beejeezus out of me. I'm quite glad I never did get a gmail account although I was intrigued by the whole invite only thing. Now they have opened this service up to the world but do they really live up to their 'Don't be Evil' mantra? I'm interested in your thoughts on this, Jonathan, Simon and Rachel, as you are the only ones I know who use it. Check out the video here

darren aronofsky

I had a bit of a Darren Aronofsky weekend having seen The Fountain on Friday and renting Pi on Saturday. I am a huge fan of his interim movie Requiem for a Dream about a group of recreational drug users who slide headlong into addiction.

And so on the strength of this movie (one of my top ten movies of all time) I went to see The Fountain. Build up for the movie has been in the form of an exquisite movie trailer....



... and with a brilliant website from the folks over at Hi-Res (who incidently did the site for Requiem for a Dream and was the site that launched their company... brilliant lo-fi style flash site here). The Fountain site is a superb experience website allowing you to navigate the three time zones that the movie is set in. The movie itself is gloriously pretentious and unapologetically incomprehensible, being mired in philosophy and religion. Most of the movie goers left scratching their head or laughing. For me though this movie was a lot more than that. It is flawed for sure. But the essence of the message is something that resounds deeply within me. Gorgeous art direction and underpinned by a sumptuos score by Clint Mansell, this film is a must for film fanatics. It feels much like the personal movies of the 60's. It explores themes of love, death and immortality whilst touching on old testament stories such as the Tree of Life from the garden of eden (the other tree was the tree of knowledge that Adam and Eve ate from). If The Fountain doesn't leave you chattering about the meaning of life you probably shouldn't have gone to see this movie in the first place. It is cerebral. It is challenging. But ultimately very rewarding. Did I mention it was beautiful to look at.

And so on to Pi. How I have managed to not see this movie for so long is beyond me. Shot in stark black and white and filmed in the streets and apartments of New York this film is designed to give you a headache. Again Clint Mansell is at the helm with the score and he produces a scratchy whiny soundtrack the crescendos in epic style as the waves of pain build in the movie. Like all Aronofsky movies he creates something of an opera with building intensity and painful release at the end. Pi is about a guy called Max who is a genius having looked at the sun for too long at the age of six and seemingly bringing everything into focus at that point. He is a brilliant mathemetician who stumbles upon a number of great importance. The movie touches on some really interesting themes such as the Fibonacci Sequence and the Golden Ratio. This 216 digit number is believed to be the key to the universe. From the point of view of the government agents who are persuing Max this represents the key to unlocking the seemingly chaotic system of the stock exchange. From the point of view of the Rabbi priests who are also persuing Max this number represents the true name of God which had been lost over the course of time. To Max this number is his gift and seems to manifest itself literally in a section of his brain, a realization with devastating results. Max is plagued by headaches and seizures which he can only control with an increasing amount of stimulants and drugs. Pi is movie genius. Raw, edgy and brilliant. If you loved Eraserhead and Waking Life this will resound deeply with you.



Aronofsky is clearly a writer/director with a lot to say and hopefully with a lot more to come. Unfortunately I suspect he may have to scale down his next effort a little as the studio execs will undoubtedly be disappointed with The Fountain's buzz and ticket sales. But this will surely be a good thing as the movie magic he creates does stem from his lo-fi and grittier film experiences.

crazy creations

Some weird and wacky 'what if' pictures here. Ok some are brilliant and some aren't so good but the ideas are all wonderful. The first set features what might happen if God were a little more sadistic in his nature and thus create these bizarre mutations. The second set shows Mother Nature's more twisted side as animal meet vegetable to generate these twisted veggies. And the last set falls into the hands of man as he toils away in his lab to meld animal and machine into these crazy cyborgs.

hey gringo

I've been meaning to post this site for a while as it has stuck with me in terms of it being a fairly novel interface design. The basic idea here is that each page of the site is one side of a cube. And you navigate by turning the box left, right or back onto it's head. What is great is the concept here. What is not so great is the execution. Look out for those wibbly lines as the box rotates. This is created in the way the 3D effect is generated. As you chop up your image into triangles the distortion can lead to uneven lines when you piece them back together (see this tutorial for the full explanation). What is also bad is how difficult it can be to select an area of work to look at (it seems to just fly away from your mouse interaction...never a good thing!)

Check out the work here

See how it feels

Ok I don't watch TV very often so I do end up missing out on these brilliant ad campaigns. Thank gods for youtube is all I say. BMW here with their "See how it feels" campaign. This is fracking gorgeous stuff. Watch and enjoy. Created by the guys over at Wanted Films it features a reworking of Beethoven's 9th Symphony produced by UNKLE. The gorgeous lighting effects are created Matrix style using a lighting rig mounted with time delayed cameras. The results are smart. This really is HOW to sell a car. By giving a notion of experience.

Oh and if you don't get my two Battlestar Gallactica references then you NEED to start watching this show (best thing on tele - via downloads in case you were wondering).

Patryk Rebisz

Do check out this wonderful short video shot by Patryk Rebisz. You may remember a post I did a while back featuring another film by this same film-maker entitled Between you and me. What is great about this guy is his story-telling ability in the most basic of medium. Here the polaroids tell the story as they are being burned. It is a really interesting narrative flow and the music heightens the emotion. Enjoy :)

toben seymour

I've just discovered Toben Seymour. He is a director working out of California and has spent his life as animator/puppeteer/sound engineer/director/content generator. What he loves is recreating old school film techniques and this video featured here for The Willowz is no exception. I am still trying to figure out exactly how this is done. This is NOT cgi. The technique is to use light to with an extended shutter lag to burn light images onto each frame. In this way you can paint onto the lens if you are clever enough. But what he is doing here is melding this technique with stop-motion to create an absolutely surreal effect. I'm determined to figure out how he storyboarded this.

Links to his homepage & youtube videos

flow nation

I absolutely love the fact that this game has no instructions and no scoring. It is blindingly simple and very addictive. Really smooth animation here enhances the gameplay. I won't give too much away as you will learn more by playing it. You'll only need about 3 minutes to fully absorb the game and you won't need to go back for more so don't worry about getting addicted. This is great use of how to pull users into your site and keep them there. You could use this as a pre-loader if the file size is small enough.

Play the game here

win a trip to space

This has to be the best competition in the world EVER. Win a trip to space. Yes please. Audi in association with the New Scientist have come up with this competition to fly a lucky winner up into space in the shuttle on the back of a plane. At the right altitude the shuttle detatches and the shuttle flies up to around 100 km over the earth. Far enough up to look down on the planet. How incredible must that be. The competition is open to all and involves writing down your choice for the best invention of the last century and your reasons why. And because Audi was involved we at GT had a hand in this. Ben and Paul did a fantastic job at creating the banners and if you click on the link here you can see them. There are 3 ads and they will switch if you refresh enough and are patient. But all have the same message. What is really great about Audi is that they are very confident with their brand and are not afraid to do an ad where they hardly show their car. The pull on this one is that they have filed more patents with their new A6 than NASA has ever filed. Vorsprung durch Technik

panoramamarama

With the rumbles of doing a 3D flash project at work it is time for me to start flirting with this gimmic. How to build, rather fake, a 3D environment in the decidedly 2D world that is flash. More on our upcoming 3D project as and when I am allowed to divulge. But rest assured it is good. The folks over at Papervision have created a really good 3D engine for flash with some great demos. Check out their site and look out for the Rhino demo. But what is interesting with this panorama is how to create this effect. Follow the link here to see a superb panoramic effect created in a 2D flash model but replicating the real world very well. If you click on the image at any point and hold your cursor down you can see how they made the image work. Literally by chopping the image up into triangles and pasting them together. Ingenious.

soda shop

Jay Brannan that sexy model from Shortbus. Coming here from Toilet Studios in NYC and singing the beautiful song 'Soda Shop' from the movie. Oh what he says about imdb.com not listing their movie is not true. At least not for us Brits. Jonathan perhaps you can let us know if you can find it there. If it is a US specific listing thing then that is a sad day. For such an amazing movie with so much to say. My number 1 movie of the year by quite a long way (other movies just don't seem to be in the same class). Oh and Jay is just soooo gorgeous/adorable. Jonathan do you know him?..... please. If only so I/we can meet him :) ;) xxx kisses to the big apple and all our friends there.

*don't read too many of the comments on this video as there are some really nasty homophobes out there*

iblinds

Apple has done it again. To complement their range of gorgeous computer wear they are branching out into the realm of interactive office furniture. Featured here with the iBlind. Yes window blinds that interact with your music. Essential? Maybe not. But a great video here with brilliant and rather hypnotic use of stop-motion video. Enjoy!

bizarre

I know this is kind of off topic but I found this blog and I just found it so bizarre. The video is absolutely terrifying and not for the faint hearted. I can see why there was a wave of suicide after this one. Please be warned it is very graphic. Please click here with caution. Could it really be true that there are frequencies that we do not know about where communication is happening.... Please email me your comments (I am intrigued)....

dark scannerly

Ok so A Scanner Darkly is a movie that is right up there on my list of movies to see. Directed by the wonderful Richard Linklater (think Tape, Before Sunset/Sunrise, and Dazed and Confused). But it was with Waking Life in 2001 when he really distinguished himself with what was essentially a new way to craft a film. Basically what he did was to film a very cerebral film essentially about the meaning of life. Shot in digital he then got a team of animators to rotoscope each frame. This technique has been used before but in the past the cells were painted by hand. This was the first attempt to my knowledge where it was done digitally. The effect is extremely unnerving and was used again in Scanner Darkly to what I'm sure will be dramatic effect.

And then I stumbled across this article about how to achieve this effect yourself. Here is the link. I am very tempted to try something in Flash and see how it turns out. It would be really time intensive but I think the effect of animating people in this way creates a mesmerising animation. I will keep you posted on this...