Hasta La Ideas

On a recent trip to Seoul, CH had the chance to check out the degree show at Hongik University, a school that has one of the strongest fine arts and design programs in South Korea. One…

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News: Lady Gaga wore the world’s “first flying dress” at the launch party for her latest album last night.

Lady Gaga was strapped into a white fibreglass suit shaped to look like a haute-couture gown and flown by six battery-powered rotors at the event in Brooklyn.

The rotors lifted the singer half a metre off the ground and propelled her forward several metres – as shown in the video below.

The high-tech outfit named Volantis was designed by the popstar, London company Studio XO and TechHaus, the technology division of the star’s Haus of Gaga creative team.

Its rotors are surrounded by white cylinders arranged hexagonally and connected to a central node above the suit, which rests on the ground using a circular stand when not in flight.

Lady Gaga unveiled the project at the ArtRAVE party for the launch of her third studio album ARTPOP.

“I wanted to make today about something even more important to me,” she told attendees at the event. “That something is the youth of the world. Benjamin and Nancy [the dress’ engineer and designer] are here with me today. Their minds are just so boundless. I will be a vehicle today for their voices… Youth all over the world.”

Photograph from Getty Images.

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“first flying dress” appeared first on Dezeen.

Kuho Jung’s Second Skin garment at News from Nowhere: Chicago Laboratory, 2013. Installation view, Sullivan Galleries, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Except where noted, all images by the author for Core77.

The premise of Desert Island Discs, one of the BBC’s most popular radio programs, is a simple one: if you were sent away to live on a desert island, what would you bring with you? Guests are allowed to take a selection of music (which plays during the program), one book, and one luxury item with them. What makes the show delightful is not the mundane realities of its premise—after all, how would you play the music after the batteries run out?—but the thought process that comes with the assumption of lack.

News From Nowhere<, an ongoing exhibition at the Sullivan Galleries at the School of the Art Institute Chicago, takes this basic premise of lack and sets it in the context of design. Developed by Korean artists Moon Kyungwon and Jeon Joonho, News takes the form of a collaborative project in which designers, artists, poets, philosophers and others are invited to imagine a post-apocalyptic world, where humanity almost goes extinct and we must start over from the beginning. The title of the exhibition comes from the eponymous 1890 novel by William Morris, a British designer who imagined a future society in which all property is shared.

A screen still from Moon and Jeong’s El Fin del Mundo. Image by James Prinz.

Upon entering the exhibition, we are greeted by El Fin del Mundo, a two-channel installation developed by Moon and Jeon, depicting parallel narratives of a young woman in a totalitarian society and an artist developing work on the side. The woman is dressed with plain severity, as many apocalyptic scenarios like 1984 and The Matrix have imagined we will one day dress. She examines a set of Christmas lights without context, while on the lefthand panel we watch the artist install the lights.

takram design engineering’s hydrolemic system imagines organs that maximize our bodys efficiency in a world where water is scarce.

Toyo Ito’s Home-for All: Kamaishi Revival Project.

This focus on an object and the narrative behind it sets the stage for much of the exhibition. Moon and Jeon invited leading design thinkers like Toyo Ito, MVRDV and Yu Jin Gyu, amongst others, to participate in the exhibition. Toyo Ito imagined a reconstruction of a Japanese village devastated by the recent tsunami, with a recreation of village life and structures. Takram design engineering’s team assembled a series of metallic implants that would make the body more efficient in the face of rapidly-decreasing water availability.

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This temporary event space by Australian design collective Sibling features a cage that blocks mobile reception and Wi-Fi signals, creating the “ultimate disconnection space” (+ slideshow).

Sibling‘s installation, called ON/OFF and presented at the University of Melbourne earlier this autumn, featured a Faraday cage – an electrified mesh enclosure that blocks electromagnetic signals and creates a “cold spot”.

The designers created the cage in order to achieve the opposite of what most contemporary design and technology tries to achieve: to disconnect people, rather than connect them.

“Connection is a popular motif in design,” write the designers. “All types of infrastructure – bridges, pathways, transportation, service systems, forums and applications – wish to tie into the urban fabric and make things productive.

“However, there is also an opposite tendency: the act of disconnection. Sibling asks: How can one remove oneself from connectivity?”

The outside of the cage was clad in mirrors while the interior had perforated surfaces. “We used circle-perforated sheeting in order to symbolise the interior as being off the grid, as one is disconnected from technology,” said Sibling’s Timothy Moore.

“This is the reality as one will notice upon entering and sealing the door that their smartphone Wi-Fi bars will drop slowly until they turn off,” he added.

Faraday cages were invented by English scientist Michael Faraday in 1836 and are used to conduct sensitive experiments and protect delicate equipment from interference by electromagnetic waves.

On/Off was installed at the University of Melbourne from 13 September- 4 October as part of the ABP Alumni Survey Series. Talks took place within the cage, which accommodated up to ten people.

Photography by Tobias Titz.

Here’s some more information from Sibling:

The right of connection – to housing, health, education, the internet, financial capital – allows humans to improve the spaces they occupy in the world. Heightened connectivity also demands an opposite tendency: the ability to switch off. On/Off takes an extreme position on connectivity through the construction of a type of Faraday cage. Discovered by Michael Faraday in 1836 it is a structure covered by a conductive material that prevents electromagnetic charges reaching its interior. It is the ultimate disconnection space.

Within the mirror-clad monolith created by SIBLING sits a starkly warm space where smartphone reception is blocked. It is a gesture to physically connect people in a space with architecture creating a filter (or temporary firewall) between the individual and the world. The space of disconnection is situated within a red grid, which provides a flattened interior without hierarchy or end. This vastness is reflected by the mirror into infinity creating a neutral environment from which to begin social experiments in cold spots.

On/Off was an exhibition at the University of Melbourne from September 13 – October 4 as part of the ABP Alumni Survey Series. During the exhibition a series of events occurred – arduino workshops, well-being seminars and lunches – to experiment within a space of disconnection. A film and book also accompanied the exhibition.

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a disconnected “cold spot” appeared first on Dezeen.

The new John Lewis Christmas ad was a huge collaborative effort between teams in the UK and the US. CR talks to Elliot Dear, co-director on the spot with Yves Geleyn, about how it was done.

The animated commercial, which launched this weekend on British TV and is shown below, is the latest in a series of Christmas ads from John Lewis, and was met with almost feverish anticipation by the media, a rare example nowadays of an advert being something of an event. It is created by ad agency Adam & Eve/DDB and is a sweet story about the friendship between a bear and a hare at Christmastime. As a soundtrack it features Lily Allen singing Keane’s 2004 hit Somewhere Only We Know.

Elliot Dear on set

Elliot Dear had only briefly met Yves Geleyn before they were asked to work together on the pitch. It is unusual for two directors to be brought together to work on a project, but it was decided that the two combined would offer added weight to the team’s proposal. They faced stiff competition: CR understands that the other directors in the mix included Pete Candeland from Passion and Psyop.

Dear is represented by Blinkink, which is based in the UK, and Geleyn by Hornet in the US. The two production companies had recently formed an alliance to represent each others’ directors, so as well as offering a double whammy to the agency and client, the teaming up of the directors showed that the two companies could work well together. “It was to fortify that alliance,” agrees Dear, “but also because we were up against bigger boys, two showreels are better than one. We’ve got similar sensibilities, similar tastes in terms of aesthetics.”

Character drawings for the animation

The pitch was a long process, and the initial brief from the agency was fairly loose. There were references such as Bambi, but the directors were left to propose the exact look of the spot themselves. “It was a lot of decoding of what it was they were after,” says Dear, “because they liked the charm of 2D animation but they liked the nostalgia and the texture and tangibility of stuff that came with stop motion. But we didn’t think they wanted it to be CG.”

The finished ad is an innovative combination of 2D stop motion drawings shot on a 3D set, a process that Dear initially explored as a student, and also in some of the music videos he has created that were shown to the agency as part of the pitch (see more of Dear’s work here). “I remembered something that I was doing when I was a student,” he explains, “which was to do illustrations, cut them out and place them in front of the camera and make these almost pantomime-y sets with them. Photograph them and then you get lens effects and focal depth and lens flares and things, but they’ve still got an illustrative quality.”

Some of the finished drawings used in the animation

The problem was that examples where this technique had been used before were few and far between, so it was difficult to find references to show the agency of how the finished film would look. “Obviously you’ve got to show people that you can do it, prove that you can pull it off, and a lot of the time I think it’s easy to go ‘it’s going to look a bit like this’, but there’s nothing out there. I think there’s a film called Flatworld that was done in the 90s and then music videos and bits and pieces that are done in quite a rough way using that technique. But it has never really been done on this scale and with this precision, as far as I can tell. That might not be true – but if it’s out there, we couldn’t find it. So finding references and making people believe that it’s going to work was a really tough part of it.”

The solution to this was for the team to make some animation themselves. They did a test shoot using a bear walk from the Disney film Brother Bear, setting him within a snowy set. “We managed to get 20 seconds or so out of a test that was quite convincing and it did what we wanted it to do, which was have the charm and texture of a 2D animation, but then with real light on it so it cast shadows out of this model set and then the world felt deep and textured, which is what we were trying to do.”

This early test can be seen in the making-of film, below. The test took over a week to complete and was shot on a shoestring budget using interns. But the effort was worth it. “I’ve heard that that’s what won it for us,” says Dear.

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Photographs showing the front and back of drawings used in the shoot

In addition to the director combo of Dear and Geleyn, the Blinkink/Hornet pitch was given added weight by the presence of Disney character designers and animators who were brought in at pitch stage to design how the animals in the ad would look. The team was looking for a character designer who created animals which were realistic-looking rather than cartoons. They found Aaron Blaise, the director of Brother Bear (the film that was used as a reference for the test), who had also worked on The Lion King and Pocahontas among other classics. “He’s an amazing artist, incredible,” says Dear, “he really understands animals. He spends a lot of his time in the wild, going on safari and life drawing animals and studying how they move.”

Blaise came back with the “most amazing drawings” straightaway. “They were really close to the final ones but because he’d had 25 years of doing Disney stuff, we had to strip a few things away,” says Dear. “Things like quite human eyebrows. Animals don’t have eyebrows but out of habit these guys were giving them human touches. Pretty eyelashes that turn up at the corners – things that would have a slightly Disney feel to them.” A big part of the process for Dear and Geleyn was getting the look of the animation to feel British, rather than American.

“That was a big must from John Lewis and the agency,” says Dear. “We were saying the whole time, it’s all about restraint, it’s all about restraint.”

Photographs from the shoot showing the set

Dear is a relatively young director, and this was by far the biggest commercial job he had worked on. He’d made his name in music videos and has shot ads for brands, including BT, but it was still an intimidating moment when he found himself asking Blaise to make adjustments to his work. “When I had my first conference call with him I was so embarrassed to be commenting on someone’s work,” he recalls. “You think, ‘who am I…?’ It felt ridiculous. I said, “I’m mildly embarrassed about this Aaron, so bear with me’. By the end of the project we had a good relationship.”

Blaise did all the character design for the bear and the hare in the spot, and worked with a team based in Florida, who ‘cleaned-up’ the drawings once they had been signed off. Back in the UK, Dear and Geleyn assembled a team to work with the drawings and do the colouring on them. “We’d get vectorized versions sent over, because they were scanning them in, so we’d put them into Flash and we had our guys do the colouring and stuff,” says Dear. Once the line drawings were coloured in, they would be printed onto boards and laser cut and then given to the animator to use on the 3D set.

Photographs from the shoot

For the set design, Dear suggested John Lee, a veteran modelmaker who has worked on Aliens and also Fantastic Mr Fox. In fact, Dear had met him when he was interning on the latter film, another testament to how far the director has come in just a few years. “I said ‘let’s get John Lee in, he’s great’,” says Dear. “He happened to be free and was really excited about the project. He ended up doing all the sets. I’d already met a lot of his team already, but I was just the guy emptying the dishwasher when I saw them before … it was quite sobering.”

The teams on the different continents worked in tandem with one another, with parts of the ad being shot in London while drawings for other sections were still being completed in Florida. Despite the intensity of the process, everyone worked well together, with Geleyn and Dear complementing each other’s working styles. The relationship between the agency and the production team was also successful. A common complaint from directors on animations is that clients or agencies will want changes at the last minute – requests that can take a long time in an animated work. But Dear remembers the process with the agency in a positive light. “The creatives that were working on it were very collaborative and often sympathetic and had a really good eye actually,” he says.

The directors, plus bear, during the shoot

Dear is happy with the final commercial, but it is the collaborative process that he looks back on most fondly. “I think the most valuable thing, I don’t know if it sounds really corny, is getting to work with the people I got to work with and the kind of relationships that got built up,” he says. “I haven’t done a lot of stuff like this, and you just drink it in. Listening to a director of photography talking to their assistant, and watching how they work, getting to sit down and do set dressing and modelmaking with these people who work in films…. Every day it’s like you’re on summer camp, it’s amazing.”

Credits:
Agency: Adam & Eve/DDB
ECD: Ben Priest
Creative directors: Aidan McClure, Laurent Simon
Production companies: Blinkink/Hornet
Directors: Elliot Dear, Yves Geleyn
2D Animation: Premise Entertainment LLC
2D Animation Supervisors: Aaron Blaise, Dominic Carola
Production designer/Supervising modeller: John Lee
Making-of film: Jake Hopwell, Josh Hine
Post-production: Blinkink Studios