Progressive Animation

I've been looking over old favorite examples of what I call progressive animation today, as one of the producers I work with has asked for an opening title sequence for one of the colleges at MU is having us produce a video overview/promo for their college. (The promo of the University that we did this summer went over very well with this particular college and they want their own awesome promo.) So, the producer came to me with an idea that, as he was explaining it, sounded a lot like an animated progression that would take the viewer through all of the majors and give a holistic overview of the college and how all of these majors are related.

We were talking about finding videos that would somewhat depict what he had in mind and I started showing him some of my favorites. I have wanted to figure out how to do one of these progressive animations but hadn't yet had a "story" to follow as my basis.

"Drift" by Psyop is an animation I came across several years ago when I began working here, and I think it still holds up:


Next is one I found more recently and was very intrigued by the Paula Scher look that they used with the text, and then really liked the simplicity of the shapes which enhance the story told by the narrator. It's by GOODMagazine and is called "The Hidden Cost of War":

What I am, what I am not

Contrary to what may be expected of me in my job, I am not the type of artist/designer who can come up with an idea or create some sort of graphics without inspiration and without the end product in mind. Early in my job, I somehow managed to force myself to create a whole bunch of meaningless backgrounds for use on any show, and I still have those backgrounds but they don't really do anything for me and they don't really add much to the shows that they end up in. I occasionally get credit for making particularly exciting and special graphics, but what is often not realized, I inevitably made those graphics with that particular show and particular underlying audio in mind.

I have come to see the creation of graphics or creation of art in much the same way I expect inventors came up with their inventions. First there was a need or idea for the invention. I can't imagine it came from the emptiness of nothing, rather I think of most inventions as fulfilling a particular need or some desire. In much the same way, I don't believe in creating motion graphics for a show without knowing a little something about the show first. If fantastic graphics are required, then I require some things as well: answers to certain questions for the parties involved about the preconceived notions for how said graphics will look and feel to an identified audience. I also need to know the interested party's definition of "spectacular" or "fantastic" or whatever adjective is used to describe these graphics I am to make. How can I succeed without a definition for success?

With that in mind, I wonder if there are any artists out there who can essentially work in a vacuum. Are there some incredibly gifted people out there who never need google images or vimeo's groups? Yes, occasionally, I will come up with an idea that is completely unrelated to any project I am currently working on and that may get used for a future project, but once again, that future project must have a need for that graphic.

I suppose you could say that I don't believe in graphics for graphic's sake. Perhaps that's because I've seen productions where the graphics get in the way and actually distract from the overall end product.

In seeking inspiration, I went to one of my trusty sources, a group on vimeo for motion graphic artists. There I found another fantastic animation called FLUX by candas sisman and after watching this beautiful thing, I read the description below. Lo and behold, this artist got inspiration from somewhere too (from İlhan Koman). No vacuum here.


F L U X from candas sisman on Vimeo.

No more imagination procrastination, please

At work I've had a few meetings about a potentially ongoing project for one of the colleges on campus. I was looking for inspiration to bring to my meeting today, thinking the project was essentially an ongoing retrospective told from the individuals who are part of the college's distinguished history, and was really trying to focus on how to make graphics for a prototype project about multiple people yet only having one person to begin with.

So I tried to focus on what the "many" could look like. I also began with something our client pointed out from the beginning - that it should have warmth and be human. I couldn't help but think of Dow Chemical's campaign "The Human Element" (Dow seemed to create this campaign to bury a shady past that has dolled out death and destruction for unknown thousands, but the ads themselves are quite good).

  

Just as as side-note, I can't think of Dow without thinking about the Yes Men who brought my attention to some of the atrocities of our generation. If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend their documentary "The Yes Men Fix the World". It's very funny and poignant as well.

I also thought of the title sequence for In Plain Sight, a TV show that I've been watching on Netflix, which makes use of many pictures that come together to form one big picture - I've also seen this done in the movie Love, Actually.

However, I felt I would be coming to the meeting unprepared if I had not thought about how to incorporate ideas into something usable, which sent me down the road of procrastination by way of searching for more information. I found a couple of other images that could inspire a title sequence. The first is called "Houdini in plain sight", by blogger Ted Warnell:

And the second is an image of the HSBC history wall, found among images of cool places to work, on a UK site of "The 6 Coolest Offices in the World":

Surely, among all of these visuals I can transform these ideas into something else that is perfect for this project, right?

National Geographic...An old goal? A new one?

So, today as I was going through old email which I seem to never bother to sift, I found a bunch of National Geographic emails. The one on great migrations caught my interest, and when I went to the site, I was hooked by this lovely extras "music" video:

If you know me, you probably know that I love butterflies. I think it's the little girl in me who for some reason always wanted to be a tomboy but could never fully shake my love for beautiful things. Though I have grown up in both the proverbial and physical sense, I do still have a deep love for beautiful things - nature fitting right in to that category. Working for National Geographic was a goal for me not so many years ago, and though I do forget about my job-related desires when living the everyday work lifestyle, I wonder if I haven't lost some of that mystery and I wonder... how do the people who work for NG keep that mystery alive? How does anyone keep that magic alive in the everyday mundane "I get up, I eat, I go to work, I come home..."?

And now I'm reminiscing upon my little-girl dreams of becoming a marine biologist, my young woman dreams of working in the peace corps or for greenpeace, and my mid-twenties desire to work for a company that cares, that inspires, and is more human than corporate. Is that dream still there or has the process of day-in/day-out sucked it away?

Inspiration Research is the path to Where?

At work we are about to begin an ongoing project and though I can't say much (anything) about it, I will say that I went looking for design inspiration directly for this project. I'm not sure I know how to design something that has a style that will last for many many videos and over a period of many years! Anything for that long will eventually get boring and old. It's interesting that in my TAM class we learned about classic styles that never truly go out of style - pea coats, jeans, Chanel jackets, trench coats, etc - they get re-invented or re-invigorated but they remain in style. So that's what we are challenged to do in this multimedia video project.

I found little in my search that truly helped me solve this current conundrum, however I did come across some inspiring videos. I wound up on a website called MographTV and there I watched a well-told and beautifully shot short called Apricot by Ben Briand, which is hosted by Vimeo:

APRICOT — A Short Film by Ben Briand from Moonwalk Films on Vimeo.


After stumbling on Mograph, I decided to stick around and see what I could find. There was a link to a nice talk by designer Cameron Moll giving a lecture about good design versus great design. So far, I've only found time to watch about 15 minutes of it, but it seems worth my time to revisit and watch the rest of the lecture.

The world of 3D

I'm certainly overdue for a new post, and since my creative work life got overrun by a project, I haven't even had time to contemplate what's been inspiring to me. However, I still have adjustments to make to the video we have been working on, and for which I created some 3D and 2D composite graphics that weren't as effective as we'd like them to be. So, my world has been Maya and After Effects lately. Noting that, it is fitting that the video I found today was created in Maya. What's more is that I couldn't help but think "this is what I think transformational and disruptive technology could look like". And that is one of the subjects of our video that has been a struggle for me to grasp. I still don't know what it means for the University's Mizzou Advantage mission, but it sure looks disruptive to me.

Anyway, this stunning video is called Artificial Paradise, Inc. and here it is:


ARTIFICIAL PARADISE,INC. from Jp Frenay on Vimeo.

My work in Maya pales in comparison, but when I think about the fact that I don't use the program 40+ hours a week (most of the time) and I've only been using it for about two years, my animations are perhaps up to par with where I'm at in my huge learning curve.

Just to give an example, here was my first Maya animation created in 2008 as a way to introduce the University's Saturday Morning Science. (They did not end up using it because it did not feature their logo. I adjusted it later and added the logo, but it was not what they wanted. They decided their flat static logo was exactly what they wanted. Oh well, at least I was happy with what I created in a week's time.)

Movies & Fashion & Musketeers!

Ok, so I'm not excited about doing fashion trendcasting in my final group project of my class, however, when the prof told us that trends in fashion often are looking at the movies for inspiration I thought it could be exciting. And then I went searching for movies that come out in the fall of 2011. And now I am already excited for "The Three Musketeers 3D".

From The Movie Insider:

"A modernized reimagining of the classic novels written by Alexandre Dumas that follow the story of a young d’Artagnan, who longs to become a great musketeer — one of the personal guards of the French crown. He encounters and befriends the contentious Athos, Porthos, and Aramis — three musketeers of legend and folly."

And o my gosh there are pictures!!!

Milla Jovovich

It just gets better and better: Matthew Macfadyen as Athos!! And Mads Mikkelson as Rochefort! ("Isn't that a smelly kind of cheese?") I may have to talk Anna (who was Porthos when we were the 3 musketeers in jr high) into coming to CoMO to see the movie with me!

Successful 3D

Today has been a frustrating day working in Maya. We just weren't getting along, as evident by the fact that every time I went to render an image she would crash. It took me about 20X before I wizened up to the fact that I should save after every single change I make. I am sure it was my own lack of knowledge that created the monster that is the constant crashing mechanism. Unfortunately I don't know how to find the bug that I created to keep her from crashing.

There are those however who have made beautiful 3D motion graphics. Here are some favorites that I've come across over time:


I found this artist via the Forget the Film, Watch the Title Sequence site, which I may have mentioned before, but it's worth mentioning again. And I can't figure out how to embed the file without downloading it and uploading again, so you'll have to click on the link to watch the TedXEdges title sequence by Filipe Carvalho.


by Madyeti47  


ARK from grzegorz jonkajtys on Vimeo.

"Save Our Planet" is a very short but cool 30 sec video created in Maya, but it won't let me embed the video, so it's another you'll have to click to see.

Vacation Photo Book - the end

Finally, the end of the photo book creation is in sight. Here are the rest of the pages:

This first one is going to be the first page of the book:

And the rest of these follow in order after the pages I posted last time:

Yay! I am so glad this is done. It took several days to do it and a couple of nudges from shutterfly, but I finally got it done and now am going to order it with one of their sales going on.

I know this may seem a little excessive to some of you, that I would spend many hours in photoshop creating these pages when I could just go to Shutterfly and use one of their templates, but I guess it's just my version of scrapbooking.

Photo book pages

Here are more of the photo book pages I've been working on the past two days. I didn't make my first or second deadlines to get this done as it takes quite a long time to make the pages, but at least I got going with it and only have five pages and the cover left to do.

In my post yesterday I included the second map picture, which belongs just before the Capitol Reef pages, in my 2-pg spread layout.

As I wrote earlier, there are still a few pages left to do...I have the first "intro" page, and then at the end are the two pages of Mesa Verde, then Black Canyon and Garden of the Gods. I'm thinking the very last page will be trip statistics and photos of campsites, etc.

Nasa Images

So today I was frantically trying to finish composing the 20 pages of our vacation photo book so I could have it printed at Shutterfly during one of their sales. Well, I did finish 5 pages in about 6 hours. So I won't meet that deadline, but I did go looking for some supplemental images to serve as backgrounds. The original idea was to use maps, but I had a hard time finding aesthetically pleasing ones in the public domain, so then I went searching for birds-eye views of Utah and came across some nice NASA images and decided to layer my own map on top. Unfortunately I couldn't get NASA's visible earth site to work, so I was stuck with some low-res versions that I'm not happy with. But, it did lead me to NASA's image of the day site which is right up there with National Geographic's photo of the day site. So here are some recent favorites from NASA's site:

"On August 1, 2010, almost the entire Earth-facing side of the sun erupted in a tumult of activity. This image from the Solar Dynamics Observatory of the news-making solar event on August 1 shows the C3-class solar flare (white area on upper left), a solar tsunami (wave-like structure, upper right), multiple filaments of magnetism lifting off the stellar surface, large-scale shaking of the solar corona, radio bursts, a coronal mass ejection and more."

Credit: NASA/SDO/AIA

"This observation from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows the floor of a large impact crater in the southern highlands, north of the giant Hellas impact basin. Most of the crater floor is dark, with abundant small ripples of wind-blown material. However, a pit in the floor of the crater has exposed light-toned, fractured rock."

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

"The constellation Vulpecula is a veritable entire assembly line of newborn stars. The diffuse glow reveals the widespread cold reservoir of raw material that our Milky Way galaxy has in stock for building stars."

 Image credit: ESA/Hi-GAL Consortium

 

And now for the image you have all been waiting for... one of my "maps" with photos depicting part of our journey. This is the second map in a series of three, so it does not include our whole trip.

 

Also, this is pretty cool. It too is from NASA, and it's a topographical image of Zion National Park. Angel's Landing is where we hiked/climbed up 1488' to the top for a spectacular view of the canyon.

From: Earth Observatory

The desert in bloom

Our vacation on the Colorado Plateau afforded several opportunities to use the macro setting on our cameras and since I tend to love using that to take close ups of flowers, here are some images of the desert flora:

Garden Trail, Arches National Park, Utah by Katrina Boles

Garden Trail, Arches National Park, Utah by Katrina Boles

 Garden Trail, Arches National Park, Utah by Katrina Boles

 Arches National Park, Utah by Katrina Boles

Arches National Park, Utah by Katrina Boles

 Cohab Canyon, Capitol Reef National Park, Utah, by Katrina Boles

Cohab Canyon, Capitol Reef National Park, Utah, by Katrina Boles

 Cohab Canyon, Capitol Reef National Park, Utah, by Katrina Boles

 Yellow Columbine on Riverside walk, Zion National Park, Utah, by Katrina Boles

Red Orchid on Riverside walk, Zion National Park, Utah, by Katrina Boles

Riverside walk, Zion National Park, Utah, by Katrina Boles

West Rim Trail, Zion National Park, Utah, by Katrina Boles

Cactus flower on West Rim Trail, Zion National Park, Utah, by Katrina Boles

Utah Landscapes

It seems fitting that I post some favorite photos from our vacation this past May since I've been slowly wading through them over the past couple of days. We'll start off with some favorite landscapes from Utah.

Atop a Fin at Arches National Park, by Katrina Boles

Double O Arch at Arches National Park, by Katrina Boles

Owachomo Bridge at Natural Bridges National Monument, by Mike Boles

Capitol Reef National Park, by Katrina Boles

Sheltered Tree in a Cohab Canyon Slot Canyon at Capitol Reef National Park, by Mike Boles

First Hoodoo sighting at Bryce Canyon National Park, by Katrina Boles

Queen's Garden Hoodoos at Bryce Canyon, by Mike Boles

View from under Weeping Rock at Zion National Park, by Katrina Boles

Hiking to Angel's Landing in Zion National Park, by Mike Boles

Angel's Landing Trail at Zion National Park, by Mike Boles

View from Angel's Landing Descent at Zion National Park, by Mike Boles

As I continue to sort through the photos, I hope to post more favorites...rock formations, primitive art, flowers, sunrise/sets, as well as landscapes from Colorado and Arizona.