Hasta La Ideas

To mark the launch of a new website for Hermann Miller furniture, Part of a Bigger Plan has created a short animated film telling the story of the illustrious company’s 108 years in 108 seconds

Amsterdam-based Part of a Bigger Plan is headed up by Christian Borstlap, who we profiled in our May issue (you can read the piece here). The agency has made a range of charming animated brand films for clients such as Louis Vuitton and Mr Porter.

This latest short was commissioned by Hermann Miller to launch its new digital platform, WHY. It’s an animated timeline of the company’s history and the designers it has worked with

Credits:
Agency: Part of a Bigger Plan
Direction/art work: Christian Borstlap
Animation: Jos Ngonga Wabeke
Music: Shawn Lee
Sound: Jasper Boeke

Commissioned by Herman Miller, Zeeland Michigan, USA
Clients: Amber Bravo, Everett Pelayo

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The July issue of Creative Review is a type special, with features on the Hamilton Wood Type Museum, the new Whitney identity and the resurgence of type-only design. Plus the Logo Lounge Trend Report, how Ideas Foundation is encouraging diversity in advertising and more.

Designers Timba Smits and ‘Flash’ Gordon Shaw have teamed up with Little White Lies and more than 200 artists for a film-themed exhibition in aid of Art Against Knives and MacMillan Cancer Support.

Not for Rental opens this week at East London gallery 71a and will feature work from studios and individual artists including I Love Dust, The Yok & Sheryo, Gemma Correll, Roman Klonek and Pietari Posti.

The exhibition will be accompanied by talks, screenings and workshops, including art workshops for cancer patients and knife crime victims. All of the art featured will go on sale on July 13, and all proceeds will go to AAK and Macmillan.

Smits and Shaw came up with the idea for Not for Rental just 10 weeks ago, after being personally affected by cancer and knife crime: Smits was stabbed on the way to work in September 2011 and Shaw was diagnosed with a brain tumour late last year. He is now receiving radiotherapy and chemotherapy.

“It’s been a pretty dark 18 months for us both, and movies have been a big part of our lives – Gordon was at my house when he had the seizure that led to his diagnosis,” says Smits.

“When we were on the way to the hospital to pick up his MRI scan results, he told me about an idea he had for a film-related personal project. I had a similar idea and we started talking about how we could fuse the two together. Initially, we thought it would be a good, positive distraction for us both but since then, it’s really taken off,” he adds.

Smits and Shaw approached more than 400 artists and asked each to create something inspired by a film that’s important to them. More than 200 responded, and their choices range from Anchorman to Edward Scissorhands.

Work on display will include photography, typography, street art and illustration, plus some added extras that are to remain secret until the opening night. “In any good movie, there are twists, turns and surprise endings, and we’ve tried to mirror that experience in the exhibition. It’s more than just an art display, but I can’t say any more” he says.

As well as raising money for Macmillan and AAK, Smits and Shaw hope the exhibition will help raise awareness of the devastating and wide reaching impact cancer and knife crime have on those directly affected, and their friends and families.

“For me, the worst thing about being stabbed wasn’t the attack itself – it was the after effects, the flashbacks and the frustration at what had happened. Hopefully, Not for Rental will raise awareness of that ripple effect, and of the fact that cancer doesn’t just affect a patient but their family and their friends, and being stabbed doesn’t just affect the victim – in my case, it affected everyone on the bus that day,” says Smits.

The pair also hope it will provide comfort and inspiration for sufferers. “We’ve already had amazing feedback from people who’ve heard our story saying that we’ve inspired them, and that’s exactly what we wanted to achieve.

“It’s easy to get stuck in a rut when you hit hard times and shy away from the world, but we want to encourage people to push through that, get out and do something. This is our way of helping people, and the positivity we’ve experienced working on Not for Rental has also been helping us,” he adds.

Not for Rental opens at London’s 71a Gallery, Leonard Street, London,  EC2A 4QS from July 4 until July 13. For more information, visit notforrentalproject.com

Images (from top): Promotional poster by Timba Smits; Not for Rental illustrations by Andrew Fairclough; Marco Goran Romano; Mauro Gatti, Sam Dunn and Chris Thornley

Buy the current print issue of CR, or subscribe, here

The July issue of Creative Review is a type special, with features on the Hamilton Wood Type Museum, the new Whitney identity and the resurgence of type-only design. Plus the Logo Lounge Trend Report, how Ideas Foundation is encouraging diversity in advertising and more

Motion studio Found has collaborated with film director Richard Curtis to create a striking film for grassroots advocacy organisation ONE, charting the history of popular music and protest in a visually arresting mixed-media collage.

Part art installation, part documentary, it combines a range of media including music, speech, video, animation and motion graphics to recall some of the most potent quotes, speeches and individuals from protest movements of the past century – from Civil Rights, Apartheid and Occupy to the current urgent issue of extreme poverty.

Aimed to grab the attention of a younger demographic and get them involved at One.org, the film was launched at a live music event on London’s Southbank last weekend, on the eve of the G8 summit. The 30-minute film (see below) was projected onto the Tate Modern following performances by music artists such as Tinie Tempah, Jessie J and KT Tunstall.

agit8 – From Protest to Progress from Meagan Bond on Vimeo.

The final version, agit8: Protest = Progress, recalls speeches by Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King and Dwight D Eisenhower, among others, as well as well known protest songs, such as Marlene Dietrich’s rendition of Where Have All the Flowers Gone? and Billie Holiday’s Strange Fruit, all set to a combination of archive images and original graphics and illustration.

Found had six weeks to turn the project around, investing a lot of time researching video footage and audio, with the help of Curtis and ONE. “Four of those weeks were spent with Excel Spreadsheets and YouTube writing things down,” says Mike Sharpe, creative director of Found. “We knew that we would deal with a whole bunch of mixed media, and there was a lot of research to be done to find out which ones to pick. We watched over 30 hours of footage and had archivists working around the clock in the UK and the US sourcing obscure footage.”

Around 15 minutes of footage were spliced together, with hundreds of tracks whittled down to just over 50, for the final piece.

Mixing up the graphic and illustration styles was vital, says Sharpe. “To keep the attention of the viewer [when projecting] on the side of the building you need to have a variety of looks up your sleeve rather than just one look. That’s what we realised at the beginning when I did the original design.”

Above: artwork of the Strange Fruit segment of From Protest to Progress, by Sweet Crude

Artwork by Found for the Apartheid section of the Tate Modern projection of agit8: Protest=Progress

Above and below: Two stills from Sweet Crude’s interpretation of an Eisenhower quote from 1953

Illustration by Ian Wright to accompany Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech

The visuals were created in-house at Found with additional contributions from Sweet Crude, Ian Wright and Olive Johnson who illustrated Dietrich’s song (see below).

Securing the rights to – as well as the necessary quality of – material was the biggest production challenge. For example, the audio of Mandela’s speech at the Rivonia trial was of such poor quality, that the team transcribed it and used it performed by Chiwetel Ejiofor.

Above: artwork for Sweet Crude’s interpretation of Mandela’s Rivonia trial speech

The film is part of the wider agit8 campaign, a call to action to end extreme poverty. On the agit8 website visitors can support the campaign, and performers – from high profile musicians to buskers – can add their own protest songs.

For those who missed the live performance, the film will also be shown during the summer at various festivals, and will continue to support the campaign online – and it is definitely worth catching up with. As Sharpe concludes, “Every now and then a job comes along that you just can’t turn down and this was one of those occasions…”

Credits:
Global Creative Director, ONE Campaign: Roxane Philson
Writer and Executive Producer: Richard Curtis
Production Company: FOUND
Creative Director: Mike Sharpe
Producer: Sue Dhaliwal
Art Director: Ben Collier-Marsh
Associate Producer: Hannah Cameron
Animators: Christopher Shone, Tom Langton, Jonathan May
Editor: Mike Prior
Sound Design: Ade Pressly
Projection Consultant/Producer: Sam Pattinson
Music Consultant: Toby Slade-Baker
Contributors: Ian Wright, Sweet Crude (Fraser Davidson, Simon Tibbs and Dina Makanji), Olive Johnson

Pink Floyd fans may recognise the cover of our June issue. It’s the original marked-up artwork for Dark Side of the Moon: one of a number of treasures from the archive of design studio Hipgnosis featured in the issue, along with an interview with Aubrey Powell, co-founder of Hipgnosis with the late, great Storm Thorgerson. Elsewhere in the issue we take a first look at The Purple Book: Symbolism and Sensuality in Contemporary Illustration, hear from the curators of a fascinating new V&A show conceived as a ‘walk-in book’ plus we have all the regular debate and analysis on the world of visual communications.

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Photo: Sim Goodwin

I have been a regular visitor to the New Blades degree show – which focuses purely on modelmaking, model design, special effects and character creation course – for the last nine years, since I graduated…

2013 saw attendances from The Arts University Bournemouth, University of Hertfordshire, University for the Creative Arts and University of Bolton. The quality of the work has come on in leaps and bounds since I was a modelmaking student! I think one of the reasons for this could be the now common presence of machines such as laser cutters and 3D printers.

This year there were 98 exhibitors, with such a wide range of creations to see. There seemed to be a shortage of architectural models though, which is the area that I work in and have done since graduation. It is also the area from industry that attends in greater numbers, looking for the emerging talents, so it seems silly that there were so few.

Photo: Sim Goodwin

There were three gems of models that caught my eye at the private view, the first of which was created by Annie Iorizzo, a student on the Character Creation & Technical effects course from University of Hertfordshire.

She captured such a great character and true likeness in her creation of an orangutan; it’s cheeky, true-to-life face caught my eye almost immediately.

Photo: Sim Goodwin

My second pick of the show was a wonderfully executed model of a bridge made by another University of Hertfordshire student, Joshua Horobin.

It was made using maple timber and had a lovely effect with strings, with each one going through a meticulously drilled hole in the carved wood with tiny, neatly arranged screws holding them in place and under tension.

It’s common knowledge in architectural modelmaking that you cannot hide any mistakes with a wooden model, as you can’t fill or spray to get rid of them which is why I had a close look and wasn’t disappointed.

Joshua was awarded the runner-up prize of a silver plated scalpel for the Best in Show.

Photo: Sim Goodwin

My final mention from this degree show is of Tom Le Gallez, a student from The Arts University Bournemouth.

He made a beautiful 1:6 scale model of Slimsfab’s The Haymaker motorbike, with such great attention to detail it even had the Kawasaki branding on the engine.

Tom has made this bike to an exceptional level it is no wonder he was awarded not only the Best Product Model accolade but also the prestigious gold plated scalpel for the Best in Show, too. And if I might add, it was very well deserved.

New Blades was at Holborn Studios, 49-50 Eagle Wharf Road, London N1 7ED. More details at modelshop.co.uk/Static/New-Blades.

Pink Floyd fans may recognise the cover of our June issue. It’s the original marked-up artwork for Dark Side of the Moon: one of a number of treasures from the archive of design studio Hipgnosis featured in the issue, along with an interview with Aubrey Powell, co-founder of Hipgnosis with the late, great Storm Thorgerson. Elsewhere in the issue we take a first look at The Purple Book: Symbolism and Sensuality in Contemporary Illustration, hear from the curators of a fascinating new V&A show conceived as a ‘walk-in book’ plus we have all the regular debate and analysis on the world of visual communications.

You can buy Creative Review direct from us here. Better yet, subscribe, save money and have CR delivered direct to your door every month.

CR for the iPad

Read in-depth features and analysis plus exclusive iPad-only content in the Creative Review iPad App. Longer, more in-depth features than we run on the blog, portfolios of great, full-screen images and hi-res video. If the blog is about news, comment and debate, the iPad is about inspiration, viewing and reading. As well as providing exclusive, iPad-only content, the app updates with new content throughout each month. Get it here.

Moving Brands has created an interactive music video for emerging band Duologue that allows viewers to control the camera angle to create their own version while watching.

Shot on an elaborate Microsoft Kinect set-up, the final video is embedded in the Machine Stop website (see screengrab below) and allows viewers to zoom in, move around and experience the footage from different angles by clicking and dragging their mouse. They can also swap between two streams, of the band or dancer Jean Abreu performing.

If they don’t interact, the video will run as the final ‘director’s cut’ version (see video below).

The agency was approached by the band’s management company to create an interactive experience to reflect some of the themes and lyrics of the new song Machine Stop, which deals with confused vision, lack of sight and the sense of breaking free of a confining space. “Conceptually we liked the idea of the viewer being able to control what you see and where you are within the video rather than the director or the person who’s filmed it,” says Guy Wolstenholme, Moving Brands founder and design director. “So the element of handing over control in the video is quite strong.”

To allow for this control, Moving Brands filmed the video using Kinect, which allowed the team to capture not just flat film but a 3D map of the band and a dancer that also appears in the video. “Most music videos are a flat film, you can’t peer to the left or the right of the band,” says MB creative technologist Tim Brooke. “But because we captured the band using Kinect – instead of just a pixel of colour we have a pixel of colour and in-depth – we know where they were physically standing when we recorded it.”

This is by no means the first time music video directors have appropriated the Kinect technoloqy. The video below, for Echo Lake and shot by by Dan Nixon on Kinect, was released back in 2011, for example, as was the video for New Look’s track Nap on the Bow, which we wrote about here.

Echo Lake – Young Silence from Dan Nixon on Vimeo.

Last year, directors Jamie Roberts and Will Hanke used a unique Kinect rig to film a special 15-minute session of indie band The Maccabees for music video site Vevo.

Creating the interactive element for Machine Stop added another layer of complexity, according to Moving Brands. The agency developed its own tools to not only capture the performance (3D printing some custom brackets, for example, to allow handheld filming), but also to create a work flow going from the Kinect to the web player, and to write the interactive website, says Brooke.

The final user experience of the Machine Stop video itself still seems somewhat rudimentary with its ‘click and drag’ approach, despite the amount of filming and software development that has gone into the making of it – it doesn’t allow quite the mount of control it promises. But it is nonetheless another welcome example of what creatives can do by appropriating such new technologies, unpicking and re-configuring them for their purposes.

“I hope that we’re using a technology in a way that will make it more engaging,” says Brooke. “You will feel more part of it. It’s fun to experiment with different ways to tell a story, where the viewer can become more enganged, and look around the corner of things. People are starting to almost expect that they can engage with [content], and more of our media is in a place where you can choose your point of view… it’s only a small step, but it’s interesting to explore.”

Pink Floyd fans may recognise the cover of our June issue. It’s the original marked-up artwork for Dark Side of the Moon: one of a number of treasures from the archive of design studio Hipgnosis featured in the issue, along with an interview with Aubrey Powell, co-founder of Hipgnosis with the late, great Storm Thorgerson. Elsewhere in the issue we take a first look at The Purple Book: Symbolism and Sensuality in Contemporary Illustration, hear from the curators of a fascinating new V&A show conceived as a ‘walk-in book’ plus we have all the regular debate and analysis on the world of visual communications.

You can buy Creative Review direct from us here. Better yet, subscribe, save money and have CR delivered direct to your door every month.

CR for the iPad

Read in-depth features and analysis plus exclusive iPad-only content in the Creative Review iPad App. Longer, more in-depth features than we run on the blog, portfolios of great, full-screen images and hi-res video. If the blog is about news, comment and debate, the iPad is about inspiration, viewing and reading. As well as providing exclusive, iPad-only content, the app updates with new content throughout each month. Get it here.