Today I saw a great video about the sculptor Reuben Margolin, he creates Kinetic Sculptures using wood, cardboard and by just watching nature, understanding it and replicating it mechanically. His stuff is just impressive to see and even more impressive is to see him go through his process. The best, or worse part of what he does is that he never knows what he’s going to get, what the output is going to be, until he completely builds one of these sculptures, imagine how freaked any client of ours would be if this was the case in a visual designers world.
Seeing this video reminded me of another incredible kinetic sculptor, in this case we go off to Holland to take a look at how Theo Jansen, uses the wind to power his unique, creature-like creations. They are actually a bit distressing to look at first, but it’s great to see and engineer creating art, or the other way around, it doesn’t matter to him, as it shouldn’t to any developer out there.
It’s an incredible coincidence that when I was thinking of writing this post I wanted to link the previous artists with the following video. Theo Jansen’s video show previously actually made the link by itself being a BMW commercial. The last kinetic sculpture I wanted to place in this post is actually one motored by Arduino (I believe), an incredible piece featured in the BMW Museum that creates something only acheived by programing, programing a lot actually.
All this just comes to show us that engineering and art has this bridge that is only in our minds as Jansen said in the BMW add and designers like John Maeda have said all along. Rationality is just another form of human expression and it creates magnificent results.
This is my first “political” post in my blog, I thought it would never get to this but this is an issue that really concerns me and should really concern the rest of the world.
In the past couple of weeks something quite scary happened in my home country of Venezuela, the government suddenly decided on August 1st to close down 34 radio stations, just like that, closed. As the ministers and president said, we decided to make “extinct” the concessions of the radio stations. Their reason was that they were not strictly abiding the telecommunications law, which for them is simply informing the public about the great labors of the government, any critique is forbidden because, of course, they are just fantastic.
What really ticks me off is the arrogance of this government and the hypocrisy behind “Chavismo”, where it’s mandatory to hate the Empire and capitalism, but it’s ok to drive a Hummer and use Armani suites.
The minister even had the balls to say this beautiful piece of work; “To our friends everything, to our enemies the Law”.
Now, in a society where the public is supposed to own the airwaves, where does this leave the public? We already lost all but one TV stations, now comes radio, which is the most popular source of information and entertainment for Venezuelans. So does the public really own the airwaves, or government control makes us believe this?
If the airwaves were ours, we would each have the right to transmit our opinions and tastes on them, and to my understanding, we should each be our own radio stations. But already a couple of years ago the Venezuelan government decided to create a uniform radio, every station had to have a high percentage of local traditional Venezuelan music so that completely made every station the same. No more specialty stations, no jazz station, or rock or classical. Yes, the people now own the airwaves; we can choose to listen to the same thing on every turn of the dial, because personal taste is for the elite.
This, of course, comes back to freedom of speech. When this happened, twitter went like crazy! Just like in Iran with the elections, people were angry, they needed to express themselves. Twitter is the new radio wave, so now, the government is figuring out how to limit the use of that, because of course, we need that, we need to know what is good and bad, Empire/bad, Hummer/Awsome!
This was a title sequence for a fictional movie about type where tipography terms and their representations are the actuals characters (no pun intended!).
So, I was walking around the city and saw these crazy letters floating around these buildings!! Good thing I had my camera!
Just kidding! I’m learning how to composite 3d objects in photo’s, I then tweaked it a bit in After Effects, put some shaky camera, with our friend the wiggle expression, added depth of field into the comp… just having fun!
This is a very experimental broadcast package that I did in the past month here at VFS. There is more focus on concept and creating a feeling rather than pure motion design, although there is a lot of after effects technical work done to achieve this graphically.
Here is my final animation for the Traget assignment for 3D this term here at VFS. I enjoyed this course a lot, and I’m pretty proud of this piece, it was great to experiment with emitters, and subtle randomness.
I’ve been playing around with Cinema 4d this term, here’s just another assignment using the sound effector, linking it to diferent frequences and then bringing the four of those variations together in After Effects of course, I think that AE is always a must!
We were supposed to create a flying object around a planet and have a ring of asteroids orbiting that planet (cloner, you rock!). This was my take on that assignment, changed the objects a bit to make it more interesting to me.
‘SixthSense’ is a wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world around us with digital information and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with that information.
I usually make fun of this stuff… I don’t really love the minority report thing where we all look like idiots waving our hand around the air to get interactivity, to me it feels like actual human interactivity is getting nuller thanks to this kind of post-keyboard world. But some of the things in this video did impress me, specially the more bizzare funny stuff at the end.
I’m working on a broadcast package for a music video online channel for my Motion Design term 4 Project here at VFS. I’ve been experimenting with variations of videos as backgrounds and using very simple type. The idea is to keep it all about the video, so the type is the actual video itself.
It’s still a work in progress… I’ve just been playing around for some hours and this is what I’ve come up with for now.
I forgot to upload this before, it was the chroma key project for Motion Design term 2 at VFS. I was just playing around and having fun ridiculizing the Hollywood drama trailer. I shot it one day and did the rest the next day… I was working to hard on my talking head about the sneaker video. Still like the outcome now that I look at it again after a while, might change some things now.
I tried out some caustic lighting tests for a logo animation, worked it into After Effects to blend it with the same animation without the lighting and played around with color. Still trying to get the hang of Cinema 4D animation. Pretty fun stuff!
Check out this Adbusters-ish Photoshop work in the subway in Berlin. The look and feel is amazing, very witty and strong message, it’s like an inside joke kind of deal, a geeky designer joke but with style. Let’s hope the young 12 year old german girls get it.
Here’s the final video Dewi, Christian, Alex and I managed to put together for the final Type project for term 2. We aimed for a film like video using still images and just animating one object to give it some life.
We’ve started our Typography Project for this term, Dewi, Christian, Alex and I will be making a short video explaining the history of the font Meta by Erik Spiekermann, here is a lookframe I’ve just finished.
I’ts done! This is my talking head video for term 2 of Motion Design here at VFS. Took me while to get it almost right… I wish I had more time to focus on this, but overall, I’m quite proud of it. Enjoy, a brief history of sneakers!
So today I decided to give myself a treat, I got this great book by Marion Bataille about fun type, yes FUN TYPE! Good one for the collection, highly recomended. You can get it online at Amazon.com
I am currently working on my Talking Head project for VFS. It consists of a 30 second video where we have to use the lower third for information, kind of like a news anchor, and animate things in the background as he talks about a chosen theme. I will be talking about sneakers, here is a frame from the animatic.
This was a one day project here at VFS. They call it a slam, you get a brief in the morning and have to finish the project that same afternoon, From story, concept, visuals, animation and sound, everything was done in about 7 to 8 hours.
That’s right, I started learning flash, finally! Brett is such a good teacher, he tought u that Flash has a soundtrack by Queen! Where’s After Effects soundtrack uh??
We went rapidly through the history of modern art and graphic design and we each did a brief presentation on a specific era. I talked about Constructivism, my classmates talked about several different ism’s and we also each had to design an animal that represents and has the visual tone of the era in art and design we presented.
This is a really good interview that I read thanks to Robin, my Visual Communications Teacher here at VFS. It goes to show you that having fun or being playful and witty as you work is fundamental, at least in Rand’s eyes.
Paul Rand was America’s leading modern graphic designer in the disciplines of advertising, book, and corporate design. He studied at Parsons School of Design, Pratt Institute, and the Art Students League (where George Grosz was his teacher), all in New York City, but was primarily self-taught in the ways of modernism. In the early 1930s, he became a devoted follower of the European moderns and employed their economical and functional methods in his editorial design for Esquire and Apparel Arts. In 1941, he joined the William H. Weintraub Advertising Agency as its chief art director and proceeded to change the look and feel of American advertising, introducing a unique blend of wit, humor, and art-based aesthetics for massmarket clients. A master of many disciplines, he moved from editorial and advertising to corporate and packaging design, creating identities for IBM, Westinghouse, Cummins Engine, NeXT, Enron, and USSB. He is the author of three books, Paul Rand: A Designer’s Art (Yale, 1985), Design, Form, and Chaos (Yale. 1993), and From Lascaux to Brooklyn (Yale, 1996). He passed away in 1996. This interview was conducted in 1990. (more…)
Here it is, my final project for Motion Design 1 at VFS. We had to figure out a story, learn how to film, animate, track, everything, in about 8 weeks, but we know it’s all done in about only 1! I wanted to experiment with making graphics and film live in the same environment and also play around with some motion tracking, animation, masking and sound.
