Jérémy Clapin has directed this delightful film for the Responsibility Project, an initiative by US-based insurance firm Liberty Mutual that encourages us all to be a bit more responsible…
The Responsibility Project (which was created by ad agency Hill Holliday in Boston) has been running for a few years now, and is online at responsibilityproject.com. Alongside a blog tackling a number of moral questions, the site contains a number of other short films commissioned on the theme of responsibility, which are worth checking out.
Here’s the latest round-up of goodly work that we’ve spotted in CR Towers recently. First up, a lecherous Paolo Nutini bends to director Corin Hardy‘s will in this amusing video for Pencil Full of Lead…
Sticking with videos, here’s director Chris Sweeney‘s new one for Marina and The Diamonds track Mowgli’s Road, which demonstrates that a bit of simple paper play can be remarkably effective.
Next up is Keith Schofield‘s excellent vid for Justice’s remix of Lenny Kravitz’s Let Love Rule. This one’s been making the rounds for a couple of weeks but is well worth a watch if you’ve missed it.
This elegant test film was created by directing team Duckeye for the Rambert Dance Company.
Weetabix ad; agency: WCRS; creatives: Dave Day, Larry Seftel; director: Ringan Ledwidge; prod co: Rattling Stick
Now for some advertising… Ringan Ledwidge has directed this spot for Weetabix, which feels a little like it comes from a different era of advertising but is fun all the same.
In between fighting an increasingly messy court case, Shepard Fairey has been working with Levi’s, who recently invited him to help design a collection of clothing centred around his Obey trademark. To celebrate the collaboration, Fairey posted up billboards of his posters in front of Levi’s Times Square store in New York. The film above shows the installation.
Ford Ranger campaign; agency: Ogilvy London; creatives: Andy Wyton, Jason Mendes; illustrator: Mark Thomas; typography: Mark Osbourne
Finally, we end with a new poster campaign for Ford from Ogilvy London, which emphasises the Ford Ranger’s ‘Real Man’ qualities… Two of the three posters in the campaign are shown here.
As part of its new evening series of Friday Lates, the London Transport Museum is staging Sounds of the Suburbs on 6 November. The multi-sensory event, curated by D-Fuse, will also screen a new short by design studio, FL@33, called 8min20sec. It’s just been uploaded to our Feed section…
The short film – uploaded to Feed, here – is part of an ongoing project by London-based FL@33, the design studio founded by Agathe Jacquillat and Tomi Vollauschek.
The DV footage was recorded in Paris, they explain, “at the Place Charles de Gaulle (aka Place de l’Étoile) from the top of the Arc de Triomphe. It offers a bird’s-eye view to the exceptionally busy roundabout below, in which the Arc stands.”
The haunting soundtrack accompanying the hypnotic, looping film – which kicks in after about a minute and a half – was composed and performed especially for the video piece by the Mercury Quartet. (More information on the project can be found on the FL@33 site, here, which also includes a series of prints).
8min20sec (2009) will be screened in HD on Friday 6 November at London’s Transport Museum as part of the Sounds of the Suburbs late night opening.
More info on the event and how to get tickets at the LTM website. Sounds of the Suburbs features performances from D-Fuse, Labmeta, *Spark and Electrovision and live illustration from Andy Morgan.
Despite only releasing its eponymously titled debut album a few months ago in March this year, Swedish act Fever Ray has just re-released the album in a new deluxe edition…
The “deluxe” double-disc version of the Fever Ray album is still adorned with the wonderful artwork by Martin Ander but – as the sticker on it reveals – comes with two bonus tracks on the CD: covers of Vashti Bunyan’s Here Before and Nick Cave and Anita Lane’s Stranger Than Kindness – both of which will sound familiar to fans that attended live gigs by the band as the songs were performed live during its recent tour. The second disc in the package is a DVD containing the videos created for the four singles released from the album to date – plus this brand new video for the Stranger Than Kindness cover, directed by Andreas Nilsson – which, for now, is available to view exclusively online here on CR blog:
Whilst we’ve seen many of the effects used in this video many times before, the film draws on various elements of the Fever Ray’s stage set, lighting and costumes used in the recent tour, pulling them together to make a dark, slightly otherworldly film featuring some pretty bizarre looking characters.
More details on the deluxe version of Fever Ray can be found at feverray.com
After premiering in Edinburgh earlier this year, the film of the best alternative music festival in the world tours the UK from this week; opening in Manchester on Friday and then taking in Glasgow, London, Leeds, Brighton and Bristol…
All Tomorrow’s Parties: The Film is a special piece of cinema. It’s been compiled from hundreds of video clips of the various artists that have performed during ATP festivals at the out-of-season Pontins holiday camp in Minehead, sent in by fans and then shaped into a film by director Jonathan Caouette.
The film brilliantly captures the experience of actually being at the festival – bands aside, there’s always plenty of fun to be had on the beach, in the water park, in the arcades and “eateries”, or in the chalets that house the festival goers for the three day event.
A clip from the film of Animal Collective’s performance from the Explosions in the Sky-curated festival from 2008, has just been released online…
…and to get an idea of the truly kaleidoscopic nature of the film, check out the trailer and the teaser short featuring Lightning Bolt that was released earlier this year, below.
Exuberance in the face of a drums and bass onslaught has never has looked so good.
Bands that feature in All Tomorrow’s Parties: The Film include: Belle And Sebastian / Grizzly Bear / Sonic Youth / Battles / Portishead / Daniel Johnston / Grinderman / David Cross / Animal Collective / The Boredoms / Les Savy Fav / Mogwai / Octopus Project / Slint / The Dirty Three / The Yeah Yeah Yeahs / The Gossip / GZA / Seasick Steve / Iggy And The Stooges / A Hawk And A Hacksaw / Fuck Buttons / Micah P Hinson / Two Gallants / Akron/Family / Jah Shaka / Saul Williams / Shellac / Patti Smith / John Cooper Clark / Lightning Bolt / Roscoe Mitchell / The Mars Volta.
Kanye West appears as a drunken fool (again, you cry?) in this short film, We Were Once A Fairytale, directed by Spike Jonze. There is dancefloor swaggering/staggering, boozed-up shagging and some impressive projectile vomiting. But then things take a turn for the very strange… and the gory.
Grandmaster Flash in the mix… in the animated intro to DJ Hero
As we suspected when we put together our Virtual World Special issue earlier in the year – it was only a matter of time before a dedicated VFX company teamed up with a computer games company…
The much hyped DJ Hero game, in which players do battle on the ‘ones and twos’ (while Guitar Hero players use plastic guitar controllers, DJ Hero players interface with the game using plastic record deck controllers) features an intro sequence cooked up by London VFX company Framestore:
With Framestore being briefed directly by the gaming company Activision, the VFX company was able to act as production company and ask for directors to pitch for the work. Marco Puig of Warp Films won the pitch with his idea of a huge stylus terrorising a planet of DJs and Framestore put a team of 25 3D artists working on the animated CG sequence for just over six weeks.
“We definitely want to do more with the games industry,” says Framestore’s head of digital, Mike Woods. “And not just in game video, but working on characters and environments for games,” he continues. “It’s exciting to think of the potential in developing Framestore’s 3D skills into the real time rendering environments of computer games.”
He’s partly in shadow… it’s the DJ Hero character based on DJ Shadow!
OK, so Framestore’s involvement with DJ Hero is in the creation of the introductory animated sequence – rather than working on the gameplay – but it’s a step in an interesting and perhaps inevitable direction. Gaming companies who nurture relationships with the big VFX players could find that they’re closer to being able to get hold of digital assets created for movies – which would be ideal when making a game based on said movie. A good example of this kind of relationship not existing as of yet can be found in Transformers The Movie and Transformers The Game. Apparently, Framestore’s Woods tells us, the games company involved had to remodel all the transformers from scratch in-house rather than use the digital models and rigs the VFX company had created for the film…
More info about Framestore’s work on DJ Hero can be found here: framestore.com/djhero
Credits: Client: Activision / Freestyle Games Production company: Framestore in association with Warp Films Director: Marco Puig Executive producer: Simon Whalley, Framestore Digital producer: Mike Woods, Framestore Producer: Diarmid Scrimshaw, Warp Films VFX: Framestore VFX supervisor: Diarmid Harrison-Murray Senior CG producer: Sarah Hiddlestone Animation leads: Nicklas Andersson, Mike Mellor FX lead: Martin Aufinger Rigging / cloth: James Healy Lead modelling: Alex Doyle Telecine: Framestore
Nikon’s new digital camera has a built-in projector, which gave Naoki Ito of GT Tokyo an idea…
The projector in the COOLPIX s1000pj allows users to project their images onto the nearest wall, screen or whatever. In order to demonstrate this, Ito (whose work also includes Sony Walkman REC YOU and Uniqlo March) decided to strap several of the cameras to the bodies of the Helicopter Boyz, a Japanese pop act, during a live performance at Tokyo’s Yomiuri Land theme park. The photos taken by the cameras would be projected on a screen behind the Boyz during their act.
Here’s Ito on the day of the performance with director Hideyuki Tanaka (on the right
Client: NIKON CORPORATION Product: COOLPIX s1000pj (the world’s first camera with a projector feature) Agency: DDB Japan Creative Agency: GT Tokyo Creative Direction/Concept/CopyWrting: Naoki Ito Director: Hideyuki Tanaka Production Company: ROCK’N ROLL JAPAN
Strawberry Swing for Coldplay, directed by Shynola
The winners of this year’s UK MVAs were announced last night at a gala ceremony in London last night, with Shynola‘s animated vid for Coldplay’s Strawberry Swing picking up the coveted Video of the Year award…
Shynola picked up the top gong, as well as the awards for Best Animation and Best Rock Video, despite courting controversy with the promo. Since its release, the directing team has faced accusations of completing the video in post rather than by hand as claimed, as well as of plagiarism (a claim rounded refuted by Shynola via the medium of pdf). Still, in a year where surprising or ambitious videos were a little thin on the ground, it is surely a worthy winner.
Best Pop Video: Will Young – Changes Director: Martin de Thurah Producer: Liz Kessler Prod co: Academy Films Commissioner: James Hackett
Best Indie/Alternative Video: Department of Eagles – No One Does It Like You Directors: Patrick Daughters and Marcel Dzama Exec Producer: Lana Kim Prod co: The Directors Bureau Commissioner: Simon Halliday
Best Dance Video: The Presets – If I Know You Director: Eva Husson Producer: Mourad Belkeddar Prod co: El Niño Commissioner: Glen Goetze
Best Urban Video: Wiley – Cash In My Pocket Director: Kim Gehrig Producer: Dom Thomas Prod co: Academy Films Commissioner: Tim Nash
Best International Video: Lady Gaga – Paparazzi Director: Jonas Akerlund Producer: Steven Johnson Prod co: Serial Pictures Commissioner: Nicole Erlich
Best Budget Video (Pop, Dance, Urban): Speech Debelle – The Key Director: Anthony Dickenson Prod co: Pulse Films Commissioner: Martin Dobson
Best Budget Video (Rock, Indie, Alternative): Moray McLaren – We Got Time Director: David Wilson Producer: James Bretton Prod co: BlinkInk/Colonel Blimp Commissioner: Bart Yates
Best Art Director: Tom Gander for Sway by The Kooks, click here to view Director: Marco Puig Producer: Oliver Goodrum Prod co: Amarillo
Best Styling: Aldene Johnson for Drumming by Florence & The Machine, click here to view Director: Dawn Shadforth Producer: Cindy Burnay Prod co: Black Dog Films
Best Cinematography: Lasse Frank for Flowers And Football Tops by Glasvegas, click here to view Director: Martin de Thurah Producer: Liz Kessler Prod co: Academy Films
Best Telecine: Paul Harrison at Moving Picture Company for Candy by Paolo Nutini Director: Nez Producer: Georgina Filmore Prod co: Colonel Blimp
Best Editing: Tom Lindsay for Falling Down by Oasis Director: WIZ Producer: Ben Cooper Prod co: Factory Films
Best Visual Effects: Johan Drehn and Martin de Thurah for Flowers And Football Tops by Glasvegas, click here to view Director: Martin de Thurah Producer: Liz Kessler Prod co: Academy Films
Best Live Music Coverage: McFly – Radio:Active: Live At Wembley Director: Paul Caslin Producer: Audrey Davenport Commissioner: Richard Rasuman Prod co: JJ Stereo
The Innovation Award: Oasis – Dig Out Your Soul In The Streets Director: The Malloys Commissioner: Emma Greengrass Prod co: HSI
This brutally funny take on a rather familiar scenario has been doing the rounds recently (thanks Gary Cook for the tip). Given the subject matter and its suggestion of a lack of value being placed on design skills, perhaps it’s a little ironic that it was made using xtranormal, a ‘text-to-movie’ service that turns users’ scripts into mini-films using its predesigned characters and backgrounds.
It’s a lot of fun and has potentially exciting uses in education as well as in the “dicking about at work making funny stuff to send your mates” sector, but here’s what the makers have to say: “Xtranormal’s mission is to bring movie-making to the people. Everyone watches movies and we believe everyone can make movies.”
Hmmmm, just like everyone can design a logo, right?
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
