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.

Read the full release here.

Work-friendly porn. Absolutely genius.

SOFTlab’s 1 minute film “Shizuku” will be shown at the 1st annual Le:60 film festival in Boston.

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.

View the intro animation here.

Paris Hilton’s energy plan actually makes more sense than both McCain’s and Obama’s. I’m voting for her. oh wait, I can’t vote…

Gabe pointed me to these incredible videos by Teargas and Plateglass. The songs are even more beautiful than the visuals. Heavy stuff, yet beautiful.

Visit their site here.

View the other vids after the jump.

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.”

via [Pitchfork]

Winner of the Film Lion Grand Prix at Cannes. Awesome.
What does it have to do with chocolate?…I don’t know. Will you remember it? Hell Yeah!

Bunghole Bunghole Bunghole Bunghole. This might be the only rap song I could actually listen to.

The new video for Justice’s Stress by Romain Gavras. I’m still trying to parse it.

View it here @ fubiz

via [motionographer]

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.

Hoping we could motion track the feel of the plastic and attach the CG mouth…errr. Didn’t quite work.
[flv:plastic_Test.flv plastic_Test.jpg 500 375]

[flv:radiohead_nude_animatic.flv radiohead_nude.jpg 500 375]

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.

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.

Interview & Music Video

Remake of the Lightcycle scene from TRON (soundtrack taken from the film by Steven Lisberger)

Not exactly Joseph Kosinki’s future remake of Tron but it gets pretty darn close. Outstanding.

View a higher quality clip here.

Via [Wired]

Absolutely amazing.

The third in the series, check the Paint here and Balls here.

via [burnlab]

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).I’ve been living on the skirts of the post production world for a couple of years now, and what I’m learning is that attention to detail is what separates the wheat from the chaff. Having “The Eye”, so to speak. The ones who have it not only allow the spell of the director, editor, and designer to be cast over the viewer (suspension of disbelief), but can enhance it. Anyone can slap a robot on top of a background, but it takes an eye to really make it believable.

I highly recommend after a first viewing of this work, split the screens and take a second viewing by dragging the slider and scrubbing through the video while paused. This allows you to stop on a particular shot to see exactly what’s going on. Here are a couple of shots from the first video on the site that caught my attention. Obviously, the fx concept here is the multiplicity of athletes moving together, but to carry that through, it’s the details that count. It can become a bit of a game to find all the differences between the shots, but it’s not so much quantity as quality. The changes look believable while enhancing the shot.