We were invited to the group show “Overlap” at the Elga Wimmer Gallery in Chelsea, opening tonight.
From the press release: Art and architecture are often portrayed as distinct, even opposing fields, though they share many material and conceptual practices. The invited artists and architecturally trained designers share common interests in generating forms, pattern, and geometries through tactile material processes -whether hand crafted or through the use of computational technology. They often incorporate an awareness of codes or conceptual layers in their work as well as new generative methods and modes of production. The intent of OVERLAP was to begin with these commonalities, and provide space for indefinable qualities to emerge, hinting at something new.
The New York Times’ T-Magazine invited SOFTlab, among 10 other design studios/individuals, to create a short intro animation for their online magazine. It will be featured this month for the launch of their Fall issue.
For their latest video from the album In Rainbows, Radiohead has gone super hi tech, by not using cameras at all, and instead relying on Geometric Informatics and Velodyne Lidar (?!) technologies … I won’t try to explain it in my own words, so I’ll just quote from the Pitchfork article quoting from the press release:
“The Geometric Informatics scanning system employs structured light to capture detailed 3D images at close proximity, and was used to render the performances of Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, the female lead, and several partygoers. The Velodyne Lidar system uses multiple lasers to capture large environments in 3D, in this case 64 lasers rotating and shooting in a 360 degree radius 900 times per minute, capturing all of the exterior scenes and wide party shots.”
Here are the original storyboards for our Radiohead video entry in Aniboom -Nude- and some goofy initial tests for the video. Click here to go vote for it
From the beginning, we had a pretty clear idea of the look, mood and speed the video should have.
The video is meant to be a play between the beautiful and the grotesque, by taking an all to familiar yet bizarre part of the body as the mouth and pushing its ‘normality’ a bit the idea was to displace that sense of familiarity.
The ‘narrative’ is pretty independent from the lyrics but they connec in very specific points: you’ll find something missing / you’ll go to hell for what your dirty mind is thinking.
This was a pretty fun charrette project to work on and we’re definitely super happy with the (semi) final result.
Here is the storyboard for our entry for the Radiohead video. The song is Nude. The animatic will follow up in a few.
I’ll post the link so you can go and vote 5 BOMBS for our video in aniBoom.
Gabe and I have been working on an animatic to enter the contest being held by Radiohead, for user created videos for one of their songs.
We’ll be posting the clip into the site for people to go check it out and vote. Here is one of the stills.
The NY Times today posted a making of video for the new Bjork ‘Wanderlust’ music video. Apparently, the whole thing took nine months to make with these guys sleeping on the set and not being paid for much of it. They start the interview off with a confession to using illicit drugs as part of their creative exploration. After watching the video, I’m not sure if they were so much explaining their process as apologizing.
One would think that in that amount of time you’d be bowled-over by this video, but instead all I kept thinking was, really, nine months? They reuse shots so often, it made me wonder how much of their footage hit the cutting room floor. To be fair, I’m not judging the final piece which is supposed to be viewed in 3D with stereoscopic glasses (oh yeah, I’ll just go to Rite-aid and pick up a pair of those…); but I would hope that they would be concious of the fact that most people are not going to see this video in 3D and that with Bjork giving them “as much time as they needed” they could create two equal pieces, one 2D and one 3D.
They use puppets, clay characters, hand drawn elements, choreographed live action green screen footage and (what the hell is that at the end?) CG. That’s all fine and good, but I don’t want to be able to tell which ones you’re using and when. Just because you have fine ingredients and you’ve mixed them in a pot doesn’t mean you’re done creating your gourmet meal. And I’d argue the ingredients here are less than fine. And I’m not opposed to a Low-Fi stylized look either, but unfortunately the video comes off as more highschool-project/ amateur hour and a bad comedy club. Perhaps like a comedy club injects you with large alcoholic drinks before the show, they should provide us all with a little psilocybin to dull and heighten the correct senses.
Have I judged enough? Now it’s your turn…let’s hear what you think.
This video was taken during our ‘photo shoot’ for the image on SOFTlab’s splash page. I was just playing with motion tracking to add some HUD’s into the footage.
It’s far from perfect, but I’m done with it for now.
Just ran into this site for a visual effects guy out in Germany, Nastuh Abootalebi. At first I was looking mainly at the site design and UI, which scores a 9 out of 10 in my book. The dual screen “before & after” has been done before, but never so slick. I love that no matter what button you push or information you receive, the site remains smooth and continuous. And, if you don’t move your mouse for a bit, everything dims down so you can focus on the work.
Which is exactly what I did (after my rather short investigation of the interface). (more…)
