Hasta La Ideas

Directors Tim & Joe at Colonel Blimp have shot a music video for New Look‘s track Nap On The Bow using an XBox Kinect camera which emits thousands of infa-red dots to track a player’s movements in 3D…

There is an obvious comparison to James Frost’s House of Cards video for Radiohead from 2008 which wasn’t shot using traditional cameras but using lasers and scanners instead. However this video fuses footage taken with XBox’s Kinect camera with CG imagery created to complement it.

“For a while now we have been interested in the possibilities of using the Kinect to shoot live action in 3D,” say the directing duo Tim & Joe. “When we heard Nap On The Bow we instantly knew the rippling pixelated images that the Kinect captures would fit well with the song,” they continue. “We found ourselves imagining a whole underwater world and decided we could create something interesting that embedded the Kinect performance footage into a CG realisation of that world.

“The crude imagery you get from the camera led our approach – the CG all needed to have a similar lo-fi yet ethereal and beautiful feel. Chris Bristow (VFX artist) and Ryan Passmore (Real Flow artist) at Munky did a wonderful job creating such a coherent world combining a variety of techniques in which each shot feels new and interesting.

“Using the Kinect to shoot and then edit Sarah and Adam’s performance sections was the most fun part for us. The camera gives you half a 3D image which enabled us to have full control over their performance. This allowed us to do all the camera moves around them both as well make them dissolve, explode and even invert.”

Nap On The Bow credits:

Director / DoP Tim & Joe
Production company Colonel Blimp
Post production Chris Bristow @Munky London
Commissioner Nadja Rangel
Executive producer Tamsin Glasson

I really enjoyed last night’s Holy Flying Circus on BBC4, the part-fact part-surrealist dramatisation of the furore surrounding the release of the Monty Python film, Life of Brian. It had some great animated sequences, too, that paid homage to the pioneering work of Terry Gilliam. Here’s how director Jim Le Fevre made them…

Le Fevre, a freelance director also repped by Nexus Productions, created the opening titles based upon his own ‘Phonotrope’ machine. This technique sees a sequence of pictures laid out around the circumference of a record player which, when spun at a fixed speed of 45 RPM, is then filmed by a camera running at 25 frames per second, creating the illusion of animation.

In Le Fevre’s ‘making of’ film, shown below, the opening titles begin around the two minute mark, though are “an early rough cut to show the sequence in context,” he says on his blog about the project at jimlefevre.com. “The eventual edit of the film had different book-ends which also meant losing the final cloud sequence.”

Approached to work on the project by Polly Leys, Kate Norrish and Owen Harris of Hillbilly Films last year, explains Le Fevre, he welcomed the fact that “the budget was extremely low which meant that the passion (from both sides) needed to be extremely high.” Also significant was that it was to be “a drama that had at its roots a powerful starting point in animation, namely that of Terry Gilliam who, although he never understood it at the time, was creating a new chapter in the use and technique of animation.”

Le Fevre says that his work aimed to mirror Gilliam’s “passion, craft and approach” that had “created an utterly ground breaking new form of animation (and comedy) through necessity on minimum budget and found something through problem solving. Well, we had the minimum budget box ticked. That was when I realised the Phonotrope technique was ready to be used.”

After designing a new, large-scale Phonotrope on the computer in 3D Studio Max and creating the animated loops in After Effects, the sequences were laid out onto A2 sheets and printed onto heavy stock.

Then, the outline frames of the sequences were laser cut (by Ewen Dickie at Laser Make) with over 2,000 produced in all. “Gordon Allen and Gee Staughton from We Are The Art Department took up the reigns to physically build the structure of the Phonotrope,” Le Fevre explains, “with Gordon carefully spending time figuring out a system to be able to revolve the structure at a fixed (and constant) speed.”

The eventual structure was 1.2 metres wide at the base and 2.1 metres tall. “We had to use a combination of a motion control rig and a 14″ ball-bearing ring to be able to spin the Phonotrope,” says Le Fevre, “and due to the weight of the tower it took around ten seconds to get up to speed and, more importantly as we discovered to our cost, about 16 seconds to ramp down to a stop.

“It should be noted that the final stage of the Phonotrope, the clouds and tower, never made it into the film as the linking scene involving chewing gum and a foot that followed it got cut, so you will probably have to wait for the DVD extras to see that!”

The final Phonotrope that was used in the film is currently in the foyer of Nexus Productions’ London offices. For the full story of Le Fevre’s work on the animations for Holy Flying Circus, visit jimlefevre.com. Holy Flying Circus is on the BBC iPlayer, here.

CR in Print

Thanks for reading the CR Blog but if you’re not also reading the magazine in print, you’re really missing out. Our October issue includes the story of Blackpool’s Comedy Carpet, a profile of Jake Barton whose studio is currently working on the 9/11 Memorial Museum, plus pieces on branding and the art world, guerilla advertising coming of age, Google’s Android logo, Ars Electronica, adland and the riots, and loads more.

And, if you subscribe to CR, you also receive our award-winning Monograph booklet every month for free.

If you would like to buy this issue and are based in the UK, you can search for your nearest stockist here. Based outside the UK? Simply call +44(0)207 292 3703 to find your nearest stockist. Better yet, subscribe to CR for a year here and save yourself almost 30% on the printed magazine.

Lots of great new music videos have been sent into CR Towers of late: here’s a selection of our favourites from the past month.

First up is this cheerful new video from Airside, for Frank Eddie track Let Me Be The One You Call On. Design, direction, animation by Mr Kaplin and Airside Nippon.

Next is this simple but powerful promo for Keaton Henson from director David Wilson. Starring actor Sophie Thompson, the enigmatic video is for Henson’s track You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are. It is the second for Henson by Wilson, following his poignant promo for Charon. Production company: Blink Productions.

An actor fronts this next video too, which is for Horrible Crowes track Behold the Hurricane. It stars Joseph Mawle, who gives an intense performance as he is literally confronted by his personal demons. Director: Corin Hardy. Production company: A+.

This video, for new single Wetsuit by The Vaccines, is the result of a crowdsourcing exercise by ad agency Anomaly and Sony Music, which invited fans of the band to tag photos of themselves at summer festivals (using Instagram) and submit them to a website. Nearly 3,000 images were submitted from over 30 countries, and these were weaved together by director Poppy de Villeneuve into the promo above. Production company: Partizan.

Two new videos from director So Me now, both of which have already proved hugely popular online. First up is Crush On You by Nero, which illustrates the potential perils of four-timing teenage girls.

The second is his promo for Audio Video Disco by Justice. Production for both is by Somesuch & Co.

Described as an ‘audio-visual collaboration’ rather than a music video, The Canadian Affair is directed by Thibaut Duverneix and features an altered version of track 032 by the Danish band The Good The Bad. Production: Antler Films.

Henning M Lederer has created this striking black-and-white animation for the track Mass by Vaetxh, released on the King Deluxe label.

We finish with a cool interactive video for Swedish artist Lune, that can be found online at privateadmission.com (password: letgo). Created by directors Zubicky & Tempelman in collaboration with production company Stinkdigital, the interaction on the site is simple but effective: essentially the more you interact with it, the more of the film you’ll see.

Steve Jobs, who has died aged 56, was at the heart of a revolution that turned the creative industries upside down. After Apple, our world was never the same again

When I first started at Creative Review, in the mid-90s, we used to hammer out our stories on typewriters. The deputy editor would mark up these ‘galleys’ with typesetting instructions and, every evening, a man would come up on the train from our printer in Brighton, put these sheaves of paper in a leather satchel and take them back to be set. Also in his satchel were the day’s layouts – marked up sheets of paper onto which ‘bromide’ headlines and photocopied columns would be affixed along with transparencies or flat artwork to be scanned. And then came the Mac.

No doubt every one of our readers of a similar vintage – be they designers, art directors, filmmakers, photographers, illustrators or writers – can look back and reflect on their own Apple-driven upheaval not just in how they work but also what they work on. But no matter how old you may be, Steve Jobs will have changed the life of every one of our readers, even those who profess to hate Apple and all it stands for.

Following the advent of the Mac, almost every aspect of the production of visual communications was changed for ever. Of course it wasn’t all down to Jobs: many others helped build Apple and let’s not forget the contributions of Jobs’ contemporaries at the likes of Xerox, Adobe, Aldus, Macromedia, Quark and a host of other start-ups. Crafts such as typesetting, retouching and illustration, previously the domain of highly-trained specialists, were suddenly accessible to all. On one machine, we could design a typeface, retouch an image, create an illustration, layout a poster and edit a film.

But just because we could, it didn’t necessarily mean we should. Thanks to the Mac, designers could do it all – but for no more money and with no more hours in the day. For all the enormous and undoubted benefits that the Mac and the digital revolution it symbolised brought to the creative industries, it has also resulted in the undervaluation of many of the crafts on which it relies. The Mac, the DTP Revolution, whatever you want to call it, drew back the curtain. Now anyone with a computer could set a line of type, design a logo, touch up an image. In every revolution there are winners and losers.

And yet would anyone want to go back to those pre-Mac days? Creative Review readers are, in the main, Apple people. We stuck by Apple in the dark days of the clones before Steve (and a certain Jonathan Ive) returned to lead us (by the wallet) into the sunny uplands of the iWorld. We had Macs, the suits had PCs: they symbolised the great divide. They were ‘ours’ and, despite their faults, we loved them. Before iTunes and iPods, before the phones and the pads, we embraced Apple and we never let it go.

As TBWA Chiat Day’s famous campaign had it, with an Apple Mac you could ‘Think Different’. Such innate understanding of the power of his brand is perhaps the other reason why Jobs was held in such high regard by our industry.

It has often been said that Apple is not a technology company but a design company. It redesigned the way we live and gave us the tools to do it. Its products were not just the best looking but also offered the best user experience. The interfaces, the materials, even the boxes the products came in were leagues ahead of the competition, as was the advertising.

Jobs and Apple created their own exquisitely designed universe. As a result he will be remembered not just as the man at the heart of revolutionising the creative industries but also perhaps as its ideal client: a man in charge of one of the world’s biggest companies who understood the power of what we do, invested in it and championed it.

He got it. And he got us.

New York music duo The Golden Filter have collaborated with Norwegian director Kristoffer Borgli to create a darkly beautiful short film entitled SYNDROMES. The trailer for the film features their new track Mother, and the final film is accompanied by a soundtrack the duo created especially.

The film focuses on a young girl whose bizarre, and unexplained ability to help others has led to her involvement in a sinister underworld. The storyline is definitely one you’ll want to work out for yourself, but the film is shot beautifully, and its cryptic storyline is perfectly matched by The Golden Filter’s brooding soundtrack.

S Y N D R O M E S // M O T H E R from The Golden Filter on Vimeo.

The full film will be released on the 10th October, and the soundtrack will be available digitally, as well as in a run of limited vinyl and art editions, created by The Vinyl Factory.