After the fantastic Vanishing Point video, Japanese Takuya Hosogane does a new video for Wired magazine.
Japanese Dr. NakaMats is a legend. Just about time that somebody does a movie about him, and here it is, called The Invention of Dr. NakaMats.
This is the preview of a film called PressPausePlay. It's about the change in the creative industry due to technical progress. Sometimes it's a bit tacky, but in its essence it's right.
Cathy told me recently about a real dare devil: Guillaume Néry base jumping at Dean's Blue Hole in Long Island, Bahamas, filmed by Julie Gautieron. Amazing!
This is an animation by London's Russ Murphy, just the audio got missing and is here. If you tune it right (start youtube after 25 seconds) it matches perfectly. Via Motiongrapher.
Stefan Nadelman, based in Portland, has made this beautiful classic: Food Fight is an abridged history of American-centric war, from World War II to present day, told through the foods of the countries in conflict. Watch as traditional comestibles slug it out for world domination in this chronologically re-enacted smorgasbord of aggression.
By Rob Carter: "Stone on Stone" is a stop-motion video animation that uses the architectural language of High Gothic and Modernism to invent a contradictory history of their evolvement. The theme starts and finishes with the vast and unfinished Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, NYC. It is contrasted with Le Corbusier’s La Tourette monastery in France, competed in 1960. The video uses this anomalous but single-minded architectural vision as the foundation for a new emergence of Gothic religious expression, resulting in a complete and unified fantasy cathedral – akin to the building that the Church of Saint John might have aspired to be.
This is the Making Of the short movie Nuit Blanche by Spy Films. Somehow it's even more beautiful than the actual short.
Via ever-great Motiongrapher.
This trailer for the computer game Spec Ops was done by Tronic Studio. The combination of a shiny office complexes with crumbling back-walls, mercenary and climate change reminds me of the feeling I had when I was staying in Doha while traveling for work. Via Motiongrapher.
This is another animation by David O'Reilly, from whom I'm a big fan. He wrote:
My good friend Jon Klassen came over to Berlin in October. We decided to make a small video, we sketched out some ideas, Jon did some designs and I took it from there. The result is this 2 minute video loop which doesn’t really fit into any category except here, online, right now, this very second, for you and you alone.
Valse Statique – La Théorie du Combo.
A short movie by French Maxime Bruneel living in London.
Via Motiongrapher.
A German talk show called "Frankfurter Stammtisch" hosts Alfred Hitchcock in 1966. The whole show is bizarre, interesting and amusing at the same time. I would wish we would still have such informal talk shows these days.
Produced by Swiss blood Mato Atom, in collaboration with Fallon London. Also have a look at other work by Mato: www.vimeo.com/2865492
FUMF is where Federico Urdaneta and Maja Flink meet to make films. It's a creative house based in East London, with strong ties to Sweden and Colombia.
Toxiclibs is an independent, open source library collection for computational design tasks with Java & Processing. After 2.5 years of continuous development & refactoring, the collection consists of >14k lines of code, 124+ classes, 18 packages bundled into 7 libraries. The classes are purposefully kept fairly generic in order to maximize re-use in different contexts ranging from generative visuals, data visualization to digital fabrication, use as teaching tool and more.
New on the Sundance Channel is Green Porno, featuring some very lively squids, by Isabella Rosselini.
Video pairing of punk rockers the King Blues and the 1817 Lord Byron poem “So We’ll Go No More A-Roving.”
Directed by Corin Hardy, via Veryshortlist.
Bristol based Simon Pyke does fantastic work with his sound studio Freefarm. And... he's the brother of Matt Pyke, who would have thought...
Heinz Edelmann, the man behind the Yellow Submarine, and still great inspiration, died this week. Read here an interview with the old humble master.
"This is an experimental film made up of over 35,000 photographs. It combines an innovative mix of stop motion and live projection mapping techniques." By Xavier Chassaing (Paris), via Todayandtomorrow.
It's inspiring to see how Larry Cuba created the wonderful Star Wars special effects with such primitive computers.
Please Say Something by David O'Reilly won the prize for best short movie at the Berlinale in Germany this February.
And we are back...! With a rather strange video for Swiss band Larytta, directed by Körner Union from Lausanne.
I was yesterday at the Roman Signer exhibition in Zurich. If you don't know Roman Signer yet you have missed something. Signer, coming from the country side in East Switzerland, makes short videos about events (so he calls it). For sure Swiss art at its best.
Roman Signer: Projektionen
October 24, 2008 – January 18, 2009
Helmhaus Zürich Limmatquai 31, 8001 Zürich
Tuesday - Sunday 10 am - 6 pm
Thursday 10 am - 8 pm
Monday closed
I'm not against coping (there can be something very beautiful and complimenting about it), but it becomes strange when somebody sells an idea with a lot of hype and then you have to find out that it's not an original idea...
Happened so with Roel Wouters' Sally from 2005, which was done exactly the same way by Gysin-Vanetti, already in 2003.
Here again, the very famous short film, written and directed by Ray Eames and her husband, Charles Eames in 1977.
In recent years, Microsoft seems to have made fast progress with image analyze and mapping software. Some of the outcomes are really fascinating.
The saga ends.
Saw this a few years in the cinema, now again on Swiss-Miss site: Mr Würfel by Swiss blood Rafael Sommerhalder.
While doing some research, we came across this fascinating video, where a tribe of ants eats a gecko, in only two days.
The Olympics are almost over, this is still amazing. BBC Sport's marketing campaign and titles for the forthcoming Olympic Games are based upon the traditional Chinese folklore 'Journey to the West'. The animation and music were specially produced by Jamie Hewlett and Damon Albarn. Through Nik.
Piero showed this video the other day. It's made by the Lanza brothers from Italy, an edit of their parents watching the World Cup final Italy - France. See it here.
Unbelievable, they did it again. Radiohead's new video is just breaking once again the conventions of music video making. Instead of cameras, they used 3D scanners, resulting a full 3D music video! Also have a look at the making. If your computer is struggling, see the normal video here.
Via Nick, again.
The marvelous adventures of Octocat, trying to find its parents - by Randy Peters.
This is one of my favorite movies ever, since my mum bought it for me when I was around twelve. The Way Things Go, or better in German: Der Lauf der Dinge. It was shot, nearly 29 minutes and 45 seconds long, in an empty garage near Zurich by Peter Fischli and David Weiss in 1987.
Our dear David O'Reilly, Irish blood based in Berlin, comes up with new series.... Please say something.
2007 has been a year of Ideas.
The short film by Saul Bass, commissioned by Robert Redford, is today as current as back in 1980: www.dasfilmfest.com/?id=270
