Hasta La Ideas

Dezeen Music Project: surreal animated creatures made out of plasticine inhabit this music video by Rafael Bonilla for upcoming British band Glass Animals. 

Bonilla sculpted the basic shapes of the creatures’ bodies using wire and epoxy, onto which he applied layers of plasticine to create their final forms.

“The band wanted to make sure that the whole video was stop-motion,” he told Dezeen. “I shot the animation one frame at a time. There’s something like 6,500 individual photographs that make up the final product.”

The video features a range of weird and wonderful shape-shifting creatures, including a fox that transforms into a mushroom, which Bonilla envisioned as a kind of surreal documentary.

“I had this story in my head about a dark, undiscovered forest somewhere that has all kinds of strange animals that inhabit it,” he said. “I wanted to structure it like a nature documentary, where you catch glimpses of the different animals to get a sense of the environment as a whole.”

Glass Animals are a quartet from Oxfordshire, England, signed to a new record label called Wolf Tone set up by producer Paul Epworth, who has worked with a diverse range of artists including Adele, Bloc Party and Azealia Banks.

They released their debut AA-side single Black Mambo / Exxus in 2013 and are set to release an EP in 2014.

The post Stop-motion music video by Rafael Bonilla
for Glass Animals’ single Exxus appeared first on Dezeen.

British digital designer Daniel Brown has created a new series of his animated flowers that “grow” according to computer algorithms (+ slideshow). 

Daniel Brown‘s Darwin animation is derived from the shapes and textures of exhibits at the D’Arcy Thompson Zoology Museum in Dundee.

It shows a three-dimensional image of flowers that appear to grow in a generative pattern, creating unique blooms derived from colours, patterns and forms found in the museum’s collection of historical taxidermy and plant samples.

“The shape of the stems and flowers are generated using splines and 3D surfaces that follow mathematical equations,” Brown told Dezeen. “A second formula generates petal surfaces by taking segments of images of the museum exhibits, and arranges these to create seamless larger textures.”

He added that the two-stage process means every bloom will be unique: “The combination of the two [formulas] ensures that no two generated flowers will ever look quite the same.”

Various plants and animals from the museum’s collection informed the shape the digital plants grow into, while the surfaces of petals and leaves are decorated with patterns influenced by textures taken from the same sources. “For example, the colourful bulbous stamens that appear on some plants take their form from birds in the collection, and their rich texture comes from their plumage,” Brown explained.

Brown employed techniques similar to those used in the production of computer games and cinematic special effects to develop an animation specially for the museum that pans around the flowers as they evolve.

The visuals are designed to be suitable for vertical or horizontal projection so the installation can be presented in a variety of different spaces throughout the museum, or even tour other galleries.

Over the past ten years, Brown has been developing algorithms based on mathematical principles which can generate realistic-looking flowers that never repeat the same characteristics.

The original flower series called On Growth and Form was named after a book written in 1917 by Sir D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, the biologist and professor after whom the museum at the University of Dundee is named.

Brown said the processes explored by Thompson in the book influenced his investigations into the relationship between nature and mathematics. “My work essentially uses the same thinking but in a practical context rather than theoretical: using seemingly ‘cold’ mathematical equations to create hyper-real organic behaviour,” he explained.

The museum commissioned the installation as part of a collection of new works it is compiling called the Renew Project, which is inspired by D’Arcy Thompson’s legacy and influence on the artistic world.

Brown has previously produced animations for installations at the Design Museum and Victoria & Albert museum in London, as well as working on interactive interfaces, websites and projects for architecture and fashion. His website for fashion brand Mulberry generated unique flowers that users could send to their loved one on Valentine’s Day.

The designer sent us the following project description:

Darwin – a new artwork by Daniel Brown for the D’Arcy Thompson Zoology Museum

“The harmony of the world is made manifest in Form and Number and the heart and soul and all the poetry of Natural Philosophy are embodied in the concept of mathematical beauty” – Sir D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, from On Growth and Form.

London-based designer and digital artist Daniel Brown is pleased to announce the recent completion of a specially created artwork for the D’Arcy Thompson Zoology Museum.

Commissioned by the University of Dundee Museum Services with grant funding from the Art Fund, the work uses shapes and textures taken from and inspired by exhibits in the museum. The work is part of the museum’s ‘Renew’ programme

Over the past ten years Brown has become known for creating his ‘Flowers’ series – ornate artworks that use complex mathematics to generate never repeating floral animations. The series was originally entitled ‘On Growth and Form’ in homage to D’Arcy Thompson’s pioneering book and Brown states ‘it was an honour and the ultimate privilege to create an artwork for the museum given the huge influence Thompson’s book has had on my work’.

The piece is the first in a new phase of the series, utilising cutting edge 3D technology that is more commonly used for computer games and cinema features, creating realistic-looking flowers that grow on screen like time-lapse documentary photography. It is designed to work both in portrait and landscape arrangement to allow for large format projection and flat-screen presentation in different spaces.

Previous pieces from the series have been exhibited at the London Design Museum and a three-story-high projected version was commissioned by the Victoria & Albert as the entrance feature for their Decode – Digital Art Sensations blockbuster show that took place from December 2009 to April 2010.

Brown was voted Designer of the Year in 2004 – the year after Apple design guru Jonathan Ive was also awarded this major national accolade. Ive commented that… “Daniel Brown’s work changes the way we look at and engage with digital imagery. It is technically innovative and emotionally engaging, but also gives us an extraordinary amount of freedom in the way we experience it”.

The post Digital flower animation by Daniel Brown
based on exhibits at Dundee museum appeared first on Dezeen.

Lisbon Architecture Triennale 2013: this teaser movie by architectural film studio Factory Fifteen offers a vision of a future city controlled by a supercomputer, where architectural structures can be hacked and insect-like drones police the streets.

Factory Fifteen produced a 12-minute version of the film for the Future Perfect exhibition at the Lisbon Architecture Triennale, which presents a vision of how cities could become transformed by technology.

In the movie, a group of children play a game of hide and seek around the city. “Through their play the children discover how to hack the city, opening up a cavernous network of hidden and forgotten spaces, behind the scenes of everyday streets,” explained Factory Fifteen’s Jonathan Gales and Paul Nicholls.

One child uses gestures to create a staircase by extruding a wall, while another is able manipulate surroundings to find camouflage.

Two children venture into a woodland area, where they are chased by a swarm of drones until they find their way back to their friends.

Factory Fifteen filmed the movie on location in India using a group of local children as actors, then used animation to exaggerate and manipulate the imagery.

Inspired by science fiction, the Future Perfect exhibition was curated by architect Liam Young. It is made of of five “districts”, including a place where sculptural dresses are made by dunking people into wax and a woodland designed to accommodate genetically modified plants.

The Lisbon Architecture Triennale continues until 15 December. Follow Dezeen’s coverage of the The Lisbon Architecture Triennale or read our interview with curator Beatrice Galilee.

Here’s some text from the exhibition organisers:

Chupan Chupai

From a clearing in the mist we scan across the city in luminous detail. A film is projected from the lookout that follows a group of children as they play a game of “hide and seek” in Future Perfect.

Shot on location in India we see through their eyes a near future heavily influenced by the imminent boom of the Indian subcontinent, an emerging technology and economic superpower. The control systems that now run traffic systems, power grids and financial networks sit in the shadows, out of sight but silently organising our lives.

Deep in the substrate of Future Perfect is a supercomputer that regulates the city and everyone within it. Reminiscent of an exaggerated silent film, everyone interacts with their digital city through intricate signs and gesture control. As the children play they learn to hack the augmented streets evading their friends but getting lost in the hidden spaces they have unlocked. They must escape from a sentient city that no longer recognises them.

The post Chupan Chupai by Factory Fifteen
at Future Perfect appeared first on Dezeen.

Motion graphics designer Al Boardman celebrates five Chicago skyscrapers in this short animation.

Al Boardman is a British designer, but he lives and works in Chicago and wanted to pay homage to the city’s architecture. “Chicago has many truly great buildings. It sits firmly on the map of global architecture and is the birthplace of the skyscraper,” he explains.

The movie presents each tower as a colourful cartoon made from bold blocks of colour and clean geometric lines.

First up are two projects from US firm Skidmore Owings & Merrill: the 442-metre Willis Tower – more commonly known as the Sears Tower and until recently the tallest building in the US – and the 344-metre John Hancock Observatory.

Also featured are the diamond-shaped Crain Communications Building, the corncob-like Marina City towers and Trump Tower, a hotel and apartment block owned by billionaire real estate developer Donald Trump.

Another architectural illustration on Dezeen recently was The ABC of Architects, an animation depicting a famous building for every letter of the alphabet.

See more animations »

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by Al Boardman appeared first on Dezeen.

UK studio Universal Everything motion-captured a dancer to make this animation, which is projected onto the world’s highest-resolution screen (+ movie).

“We choreographed a contemporary dancer in a motion capture studio,” Universal Everything founder Matt Pyke told Dezeen. “We then transformed the motion capture data into a digital sculpture, formed from the trails of human movement.”

The hundreds of white light points that form the dancing figure become strands that glow yellow, then red, before solidifying into blue as the dancer moves across the screen.

Universal Everything produced animations at a highly detailed 16K resolution for the 25-metre-wide by four-metre-high screen in the Hyundai Vision Hall, located at the South Korean motor group’s Seoul campus.

“The film was produced at such a high resolution to achieve a life-sized dancer moving through the space,” said Pyke.

The studio and various collaborators created 18 short films for the hall to turn it into “a space that inspires leaders, engineers, scientists, workers and designers to learn, rethink, and collaborate.”

More digital installations on Dezeen include Arik Levy’s interactive screen that uses visitors’ movements to mutate computer-generated crystals and a wall of digital animals that distract children on their way to surgery.

See all our stories about installations »

Universal Everything sent us the following information:

Hyundai Vision Hall

Euisun Chung, Vice Chairman of the Hyundai Motor Group (HMG), has a vision for the company that he leads. His aim is to align HMG with the best contemporary art, sculpture and digital design in the world. Artistic invention and innovation will be at the heart of both Hyundai and Kia’s future vision.

“The Vision Hall at Hyundai Motor Group’s Mabuk Campus is a symbolic space for presenting employees with Hyundai Motor Group’s values, providing them with a sense of pride, and sharing with them its dreams. The media wall, the central focus of the Hall, screens three video artworks that convey the vision and core values of the group.

An interactive artwork ‘Who Am We’ by world-renowned artist Do-Ho Suh was designed to develop pride and solidarity among the group’s employees and was produced through the participation of employees throughout the world. A metaphorical film series ‘Mobius Loop’ by Universal Everything expresses the group’s vision, management philosophy and core values. The third film, ‘Documentary’ depicts the last 10 years of Hyundai Motor Group’s history.

The Vision Hall – through continuous development of diverse creative content in collaboration with the group’s employees is a digital media archive that conveys and communicates the vision of Hyundai Motor Group” – Euisun Chung

To date HMG have collaborated with leading exponent and practitioner of Korean art Do Ho Suh, architect Elho Suh, and Peter Schreyer – Chief Design Officer for KIA, one of the world’s leading automotive designers (and a fine artist in his own right). The latest talent to be invited on-board are Universal Everything (UE) – an internationally acclaimed, UK based multidisciplinary studio working at the crossover of digital art and design.

The HMG Vision Hall

The Vision Hall is the first physical manifestation of E.S. Chung’s thinking. A contemplative and Zen like space at the entrance to Hyundai’s Mabuk University Campus – Elho Suh’s minimalist masterpiece that sits high in the verdant hills outside Seoul. Measuring around 900sqm the Hall is stripped of superfluous decoration, allowing visitors to appreciate its rich palette of materials and more importantly to concentrate the eye on its focal point and crowning glory – a 25m wide, 4m tall, 44k resolution screen seamlessly constructed from 720 micro tiles.

This is a space that will greet the majority of HMG’s 80,000 worldwide employees over the coming months – a space that will allow leaders, engineers, scientists, workers and designers alike to learn, rethink, collaborate and be inspired.

Universal Everything’s brief

Universal Everything were commissioned to fill the world’s highest resolution screen with content that would simply ‘inspire’. Such creative freedom is indeed rare. Matt Pyke, UE’s founder and Creative Director, was specifically asked not to include any brand related slogans or logos – furthermore he was requested not to feature Hyundai or Kia cars currently in production.

The sole ‘commercial’ request was to nod at the ‘mobius loop’ concept that underpins HMG’s whole ethos and production process. This loop symbolizes the infinite cycle of resource circulation and serves to connect all the innovative, creative activities and events of the Group into an organic whole. As an illustration HMG make steel to make cars, and then the cars are recycled to make more steel.

“The sheer scale of the vision hall, and the freedom that the HMG granted us gave us the power to create powerful, immersive audio-visual experiences which had never been seen or heard before. The commission allowed us to push our ambitions, transforming familiar subjects and materials into hyper real beautiful abstract expressions” – Matt Pyke

The intention is to allow Hyundai and KIA’s staff to digest the work openly and personally – to allow a deeper connection and to arrive at their own interpretations of the artworks – possibly seeing the familiar in the unfamiliar. The shear scale and resolution of the onscreen content combined with an immersive sound system would instill HMG’s staff with a sense of shared pride and solidarity – making them realize that they are indeed an integral part of the ‘bigger picture’.

Why ask UE?

UE were asked on board at the inception of the Vision Hall project as HMG’s ‘digital artists in residence’. The invitation came on the back of artistically pioneering and challenging work created for (amongst others) La Gaite Lyrique – Paris’ brand new Digital Art Museum, Deutsche Bank’s Hong Kong HQ and Coldplay’s sell out world tour of 2012.

UE’s response

The project has been the studio’s most ambitious project to date – requiring the core staff of 4 to swell to over 30 for the duration of the project. Matt Pyke and long term collaborator, director Dylan Griffith’s response to the challenging brief has yielded 18 films in total, ranging in duration from 00’40” to 02’45”. Created exclusively for their architectural context, the films allow the giant screen to become a ‘stage’ – a performance space that is often filled with life size humans and abstracted production processes.

The films mix a myriad of animation styles and live action – building upon UE’s trademark ethos of ‘maximum innovation’. Abstraction is pitted against familiarity to engage all types of viewer – whilst themes such as nature, technology and mans relationship with them feature heavily. All areas of HMG’s activity are explored with hyper real vision and audio – from steel creation to architecture, construction, future technologies, the corporation’s diverse multi-talented workforce to car design and production.

GGI studios in London, sound engineers in Germany and the UK, Korean programmers, an Italian Director of Photography and Film Directors from Amsterdam and Hong Kong were choreographed from UE’s home base of Sheffield, UK.

The post Made by Humans
by Universal Everything appeared first on Dezeen.