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.

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]

Gabe just pointed me to this amazing stop-motion-painting-on-walls video from Buenos Aires. Absolutely incredible.
Take a look at some of their other work here.

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]

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]

Here is the clip I could get of the interactive animation at Deitch. I would guess that it was made in Processing…

The French movie Persepolis, created and co-directed by the Iranian Marjane Satrape, based on Satrape’s graphic novel of the same name is absolutely fantastic. The story follows the childhood and teenage years of an Iranian girl (Marjane) from the times of the Shah’s regime in Iran and on to the 80′s, when she’s sent abroad. The animation is stunning in its simplicity and with a richness and care to detail that is outstanding. Her passion for western music makes for some hilarious and beautiful moments -headbanging to Iron Maiden and dealings with bootleg sellers. Her amazing grandmother and her talk-back to authority (God included) put it over the top.

Go see it.

SOFTlab recently completed design and production work for the interior of the new bakery How Sweet It Is in the Lower East Side. Studio DB (who designed the overall space) approached us about creating a flower themed pattern for the ceiling and backwall. We scripted simple ‘pattern’ generation machines which allowed us to very quickly visualize multiple options in a very short amount of time. The pattern was then CNC milled out of three different depths in whitewashed plywood at Mackinnon-Tompkins and installed by Studio DB.

View some more images after the jump and visit it SOFTlab’s site here.

Absolutely amazing.

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

via [burnlab]

So tonight the opening for Illumination (v2.0) has happened. The show was at the Bravin Lee gallery in Chelsea. We (SOFTlab) produced all the video work and animations together with artist Michael Somoroff and his team. The installation includes a 270-degree video projection which, I have to admit, looked pretty amazing.

If you’re in the city, go check it out. We will soon be posting stuff on our site .

More images from the opening after the jump.

The animations themselves don’t look as good on their own. At the exhibit they are projected over a scrim. A mannequin wearing the actual garment is placed behind in the dark. The animation then fades out and the mannequin fades in (with lights slowly fading in, then back out). Scale makes a big difference too, they are projected close to life size which makes it look even more dramatic. In short, they look fantastic (that’s me being modest).

Here is my favorite of the two.

Read more on our site here.

The large format sculpture Illumination I, by Michael Somoroff opened at the Rothko Chapel in the Fall’07.
SOFTlab did all the 3D modeling and the initial prototyping/milling of smaller scale models.

Here are some images of the production stage of Illumination I. The manufacturing was done at Krysler out in Napa.
View more of the project here.

Generative audio visualization by Patric Schmidt and Benedikt Groß.
View it here
Check out his site for some very interesting projects: looksgood.de

This one is pretty excellent

via [generatorX]