FEATURESThe Australian animators at OhYeahWow with their second video ‘Rippled’ create a testament to imagination, logistical tenacity and artistic grace. They have continued to refine their inspired style from the more freeform “Lucky”, which won Best Animated Music Video at St Kilda Film Festival and was shortlisted for exhibition at the Guggenheim.
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Music Videos
All the beautiful lights of OhYeahWow
Wednesday, July 13th, 2011
KaAM Collective hears the music
Friday, June 24th, 2011“Elle Demeure” A new music video for Ana Dess directed by Hélène Ducrocq of KaAM Collective
Ducrocq creates a spare and stylish look to perfectly match the feel of the music. The song “Elle Demeure” (fr. translation ‘remains’) tells the story of a house, whose walls tell a story of the woman who lived within. Once a wild lone wolf, she marries, endures tragedies and finds escape through music.
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More visionary work from Michael Please
Thursday, June 2nd, 2011Michael Please follows up his BAFTA winning short film The Eagleman Stag with an ambitious animated music video for Brooklyn band TV On The Radio. The promo was commissioned as part of the band’s feature length film for their third album, Nine Types of Light.
Michael has a way of seamlessly weaving grand abstract cinematic concepts with the subtle interest of his details. They always come together to engage us in an inner psychological story as well as taking us on a beautifully lush visual journey.
We’ve also included a charming short- ‘ZombieGotchi’, that shows his brilliant knack for simplicity, warmth and dark humor in character creation.
Here is a behind the scenes look at Michael’s blood animation. It is a slowed down frame-rate test of the blood spurt, which was all sculpted in camera. Michael tells us that he used his toes to operate the Dragon Keypad when both his hands were in the shot!
Metronomy Animates The Look
Monday, April 25th, 2011The latest clip from the band Metronomy blends catchy beats with animated birds – who drive bumper cars. We had a chance to ask the animation supervisor John Joyce about the project.
John Joyce -
The project was both fun and intense. It was originally supposed to be completed in about a week. Director Lorenzo Fonda wanted a stop motion video from the beginning but do to the original time frame we thought up a variety of techniques that would make the work load more practical. We were set on doing a pop through of each of the seventy storyboards and dissolving between exposures like a 3D picture book. However the label wanted animation and in turn pushed the deadline a little. I brought friend and co worker Max Winston on to the project and he and I spent eight days building the puppets and props at the very generous Screen Novelties (Thanks Guys).
During the build process we were constantly sending in progress photos and designs back and forth with the director. For the animation we had two stages and six days. There was around seventy shots and a lot of them called for all three puppets at once. Each day Max and I figured out our shot lists and tried to get about 30 seconds of animation. It was pretty crazy, thankfully the DP Justin Gurnari was stealthy between setups and kept us moving quickly. One of the reasons I entered the animation world was to collaborate with other artists who shared the same passions. In hindsight the project was pretty down and dirty compared to the way stop motion projects are typically planned and executed but in turn it created an opportunity for us all to work in a more spontaneous creative fashion. The end result is something we are all proud of.
Here is a fun making-of time-lapse:
Some pics:
Moving Sand Animation by One Wing Fly
Tuesday, March 1st, 2011Grammy nominated directors Yuval & Merav Nathan of One Wing Fly (“Her Morning Elegance”) directed this ambitious sand-animated music video, Lose This Child by Eatliz. We asked Yuval if he would tell us a bit about the production.
Yuval Nathan-
The concept of the video was to have a glance to the beach on the times that we, humans, don’t know, and through this view to discover a whole new eco system that turns back to sand as the sun rises. Having the story at night gave us a good solution of lighting the sand sculptures at the beach. The main problem with sand is the fact it is monochromatic and has a very noisy texture.
By shooting at night, we had a full control on the factors of light. And by using hard light we actually made a very defined and clear, black and white image. On the other hand, shooting outside on the summer nights created a time limitation, we had to finish a shot before sunrise. The beach is very dynamic and it is impossible to keep on creating a shot after a day. The sand on the beach is always in motion by water wind animals and humans. In total we had about 35 nights on the beach. The complex shots of the Medusa singing had to be shot in our studio, since it took more then a night per shot. The top shot of Medusa singing alone, took four days of animating.
Using Dragon
The whole video (except the 3D shot of the star dance) was shot on Dragon Stop Motion. After shooting few commercials on Dragon who were based on our previous music video “Her Morning Elegance” we knew it is a must to have this software for “Lose This Child”. We had the Dragon on a laptop, which made things very light and easy. At nights we took it to the beach (feeding the computer with a nice amount of sand) and at days, we shot with it in the studio. Using the Dragon’s image reference we were able to position the compositions that we planed in the 3D previz fast and precise. We also used it to compare the position of a character to its position in the previous shot and this way to achieve a better cut.
Best regards,
Yuval
