Experimental Animation

Eyeworks Festival: Funky Figures from Eyeworks Festival on Vimeo.

I'm getting together visuals for my time based media class. We're looking at experimental animation this week. These 3 in particular caught my eye. The first from Oskar Fischinger, made in 1938!! The oldest example I could find. It's really beautiful and so interesting as well to see how it was made. The second from the Eyeworks Festival vimeo channel - a lovely mix of different styles, textures etc. The final one is was created for a Jon Hopkins performance. He's amazing!! I had the pleasure of seeing one of his shows in London about a year ago now, so inspiring.

All of this is really making me want to spend more time creating! All my time is spent planning lessons etc these days.

Mark Clare - I Believe In You

Image taken from markclare.com

Mark Clare has a beautiful exhibition in Crawford art gallery at the moment. My favourite piece is DemocraCity. I first saw it at Dublin Contemporary and it totally transfixed me then as it did last Saturday when I visited the Crawford exhibit. There's something very hypnotic about it, there's a deep sense of isolation, almost moving into bleakness. The landscape depicted seems both desolate and pure at the same time. The music accompanying it is just beautiful as well. It's one of the loveliest and most impactful pieces of video art i've ever seen.

The exhibition has quite an academic write-up of the concepts behind the video, I wasn't aware of any of this while watching it and was still totally captivated and absorbed by the piece without knowing any of the politics behind it.

Here's an excerpt from the exhibition publication:

In the animation we travel through a timeline of iconic Modernist buildings, symbolic of a utopian dream and on through a cityscape and the industrial structures necessary to deliver the fuel that powers our cities. Finally we move into a landscape based on artist renditions for the Onkalo waste depository site...

You can read more about the work here.

It's in the Crawford gallery until November 1st, go see it!

Good Wives and Warriors animate!

Just came across this Good Wives and Warriors animation through Computer Arts. Their illustrative style fits perfectly into a psychedelic trance-y type animation. Can't wait to see more of this from them!

Here they are chatting about their process, I love what they do, it seems like a stream-of-consciousness, i'd love to hear about how they go about planning for these large scale paintings. Do they plan? Or do they just go with whatever comes out?

You can see more of their work on their website, I blogged about them last year as well.

First Year Animations

One of my first year groups recently completed these animations in our art class. I'm so impressed with how much they learned and how well they applied it, we had very limited time to complete these animations and I thought that we would still be working on them after Christmas, happily, they all got done in time for the Christmas break. So proud of them!

Slow Motion Heroes vs Wall Of Sound

It's been a very busy few months, only getting time to blog stuff now! I finished up college for 2011 at the beginning of December and spent the next couple of weeks developing animations for projection at the Slow Motion Heroes Wall of Sound gig. The three animations looped on a projected background through out the gig. The animations were based on the artwork for three of the EPs. It was my first time doing anything like this, if I was doing it again i'd definitely make a few changes but over all I was pretty happy with the result.

I uploaded just a minute of each animation to Vimeo (see below). On the night the animations were longer with lyrics from the songs overlaid on top. Definitely enjoyable and something i'd like to do again! Unfortunately I took no photos *kicking myself* but I have this pic of the lads soundchecking before the gig with "One Liners" in the background.

Anni Albers - Original Op Artist?

I'm doing some research for a vj animation i'm currently working on for Slow Motion Heroes. It's for the upcoming "Wall of Sound" gig on the 28th of December. I'm doing a short projection animation of about 4 minutes, each minute reflecting one of their 4 eps, at the moment i'm working on the (soon to be released) "one liners" ep. My idea was to make something based on op-art, initially I had the work of Sol LeWitt in mind, the textile designs of Anni Albers (which I LOVE!) also sprang to mind as being very similar. I just wanted to share some of the images i've found here. If you're interested, Gunta Stolzl (her peer) also has some amazing textile designs, very inspirational stuff!

Animation Summer Camp Work

So here are the rest of the animations the young people did in our animation summer camp. So proud of them all! They all did so well and it was so great to see how happy they were with their work!

Animation Summer School!

Mars Party from Maria Murray on Vimeo.

Sample animation from this summers Animation Summer Camp. We were delighted with how it went! The group were great, 13 kids aged 7 to 14, they all worked really well together and produced some really great work!

The camp ran from the 18th - 21st of July in the Educate Together school, Herons Wood, Carrigaline.

Animation Summer School!

I'm running an animation summer school this July in Carrigaline with 3 other facilitators, i'm really excited about it! The site is animationspace.weebly.com/. That came together very quickly during the week, weebly.com is the quickest / handiest thing ever.

David O' Reilly - Please Say Something

This BLOWS MY MIND. Seriously, it's incredible, the most moving piece of animation i've seen in ages, perhaps years, perhaps ever! I saw it yesterday for the first time and it blew me away. I love the audio in it, the graphic style of it, the beautiful work with colour and b&w sets and the emotion and heartbreak of it all. I'm going to have to watch ALL the David O' Reilly animations now, in the hope that they're all this beautiful!

More MWM

A while back I blogged about a number of deadly murals I came across on the web (not in real life, unfortunately!).

This music video based on MWM's murals is now doing the rounds online, it's gives a nice insight into the process behind huge undertakings such as these, as well as also being a very nice piece of stop-motion animation. I love watching the murals grow over the walls!

Read and see more here, at buzz-beast.com.

MAI Animation Screenshots

Just finished a first pass of the MAI animation, there's a lot of camera movement in the animation which is nice, gives it some fluidity. Have to find a backing track now, aargh! It takes ages to go through the stock music sites.

Storyboards - MAI

Storyboard samples from MAI animations i'm working on at the moment. It's mad colourful (as you can see!) because the logo is so colourful, and the software itself is all colour coded. Parts of it are quite similar in style to the Sigtec animations I did last year (eg, the industry icons), this is because they are actually partner companies. This first one should be finished by the end of the week, HOPEFULLY!

Am simultaneously managing the development of an animation for AIB and the social networking project we have at the moment, so a lot of juggling!

Nairtl Screenshots

Wow, so i'm just back from Dubai almost TWO WEEKS late due to the Icelandic Volcano God.

I'm tearing busy, lots of lost time to make up for, some niggling adjustments to the Nairtl promo (screenshots above) plus I have a lot to prepare for the Sloop2 meeting in Romania next week. First time going to Romania! Am intrigued.

And to finish... best volcano joke i've heard so far... "yo momma so fat, when she was cremated flights in Europe were cancelled for a week!" Ahaha!

Amazing PIXELS!

I'm still up the walls for that Nairtl video BUT...

this just turned up in my twitter feed via elvis communications

It's fantastic!! I had to go and find out more about, it's from One More Production and was created by Patrick Jean, One More Prod's latest signing apparently. Deadly stuff!

I am not an artist

Had fun doing this little gif today for I am not an artist. It popped up on design you trust during the week so I filed it away to do at the weekend! It's curated by Soon in Tokyo, I think it's a really cool idea, like a digital version of contributing a patch to a quilt, wonder how long it'll run for?

It was done in photoshop cs4, which has a very handy animation feature. Feel like I did something productive with my Saturday now, which from the outset seemed like it was doomed to a be a hangover write-off!

Catastrophe Video (Jean Jullien)

I really enjoy Jean Jullien’s minimalistic, colourful and slightly whimsical illustrative style. I keep an eye on his website for exhibitions and new projects, which is how I chanced across the Catastrophe video for NIWOUINWOUIN (no idea how that’s pronounced!).

This video is typical of Jean Julliens style, I love it! Great use of colour, lovely stop-motion style, though it could possibly have all been done in aftereffects. Great tune as well, love the bouncy/happy hardcore vibe to it, and the video is bang on in capturing it’s fun, slightly hyper buzz!

Bats Video (We buy your kids + Mighty Nice)

I spend a lot of time researching styles and just looking out for lovely things in general! This gorgeous video caught my eye recently, it’s by We buy your kids and Mighty Nice, a music video for a guy called Paul Dempsey.

I love the rendering style, it’s so expressive and evocative. I’ve been looking at Henri Rousseau paintings recently (check the beautiful Sleeping Gypsy above!) as reference for an oil pastels image i’ve begun work on. This video really reminds me of his paintings, incredibly dreamlike and sensuous.

ZAPA Tag Marketing Animation

Last week was the handover date for the ZAPA tag marketing animation. Due to the short turnover time of the job we subcontracted a graphic artist and animator, Pearse Cullinane, to animate the piece. I supplied him with full storyboards, audio and image library and happily, we made the deadline! Here are some of the storyboard panes. ZAPA have quite a strong existing corporate ID, the line drawing style, and much of the line drawings themselves, were taken from the existing ZAPA identity.

New Essential French Demo

Happy New Year!

So here are some stills from the Essential French demo I was working on before Christmas, again the demo was made in aftereffects, a mix of vector graphics and stock photography. The course itself was developed by us in DEIS using a mix of articulate studio and flash. In terms of design I concentrated on colourful, chunky, fun graphics to appeal to the secondary school target audience. As part of the design I developed icons for the three sections of the courses; Listening, Reading and Vocabulary, and Grammar, you can see these in the screenshots above. We worked closely with the Essential French grind school to develop an online moodle portal populated with French language lessons. The lessons were informed by the schools face-to-face experience as well as our own expertise in the area and feature a mix of accessible learning resources (such as mp3s and vocab lists) as well as interactive, self-corrected exercises with intelligent feedback and step-by-step introductions to key grammatical points.

DEIS also developed a site for Essential French, see; essentialfrench.ie