Reel of the Month Club (Dec. 2024): Coat of Arms
December 21, 2024
Beautiful exploratory frames from UK studio FutureDeluxe (London/Brighton) created as branding experiments in for Nvidia who asked the crew to development ideas “to demonstrate the computational power and creative potential” of their visual computing technology. “The thread images were created in Softimage and 3ds Max whilst the others in C4D with thinking particles, then rendered in Vray.” [Watch]
Garson Yu and the crew at yU+co in LA handled concept, design and time-lapse CG animation in this short/sweet open for the new HBO comedy from Mike Judge where “various tech companies start up, expand, collapse, and quickly get supplanted by newer, fast-growing companies.” [Watch]
And the Award for Best Performance by a Deaf Blue Monster in a Music Video goes to Oh Yeah Wow director Darcy Prendergast who spent three months learning the Auslan sign interpretation of the song’s lyrics then endured a 26-hour shoot on a scorching 40C-degree day after only an hour’s sleep. Co-directed by Andrew Goldsmith. [Watch]
Sometimes all the elements of a production work so well together it just makes you wanna watch again. In the case of “Cooks Range” for Lurpak butter products thru W+K London, those elements include: Blink director Dougal Wilson, DoP Stephen King Roach, editor: Joe Guest @ Final Cut, the VFX/post team at MPC, sound designer Aaron Reynolds @ Wave Studios, and a hot young composer named Richard Strauss.
The campaign also includes delicious print assets like the one below featuring photography by Blink Art film-maker and photographer Ryan Hopkinson.
Inspired by the work of M.C. Escher, Japanese woodblock prints and a love of architecture, Monument Valley from ustwo took the iOS gaming world by storm on it’s release last week with a combination of minimal character design, gorgeous pallets and immersive, unhurried gameplay (the total absence of in-app [Watch]
London’s weareseventeen tackles an animated Easter broadcast design package for BT by “focusing on the beauty of Springtime” and avoiding the holiday cliches. But so much 3D beauty comes at a price according to creative director and co-founder Steve Simmonds, “Some of the frames took 22 hours to render on this one, probably our biggest technical wrangle to date.”
[Watch]
Paris graphic and motion design company NAKED teams with ROOF in New York to create 45 richly detailed and lovingly rendered 3D broadcast bumpers for France’s TF1 network. The five-month transatlantic collaboration happened over a cloud-based pipeline built with tools like Podio.com and Amazon allowing the [Watch]
Blacklist/Paranoid director Cisma (Denis Kamioka) whisks us forward in time to document life on the streets of Brazil in 2044 and returns with this 10-minute opus for MC Criolo complete with eerie future tech courtesy of CLAN vfx in São Paulo. Check the following interview with the director to learn how this project [Watch]
Glassworks Amsterdam director Rudiger Kaltenhauser puts a frigid 3D-animated twist on the extreme macro world of fabric technology (and David Beckham’s skin) for Adidas thru the Meanwhile agency. Check Kaltenhauser’s G-STAR ‘Art of RAW’ spot for more CG macro magic plus Skrillex and a skeleton dog. Audio: Kaiser Sound Studios. [Watch]
Ambitious and snappy new CG “Coming Soon” intro now hitting Scotiabank cinemas across Canada produced in stereoscopic 3D by creative directors Anthony Scott Burns, Abdul Mohamud and the Topix crew in Toronto thru agency Capital C. [Watch]
Inspired by George Orwell’s 1984, the Snowden leaks and the Arab Spring, London animation director Simon Russell unleashes “Dysco,” his CG experiment created “with a tight link between the audio and visual elements – the intention was to evoke an experience similar to synesthesia, where sound, vision, color and [Watch]
Nexus designer/director/animator Johnny Kelly continues to demonstrate his multi-media mastery with this graphic treatment for a commission from Pivot Dublin and Dublin City Council “to promote wider acceptance and use of design as a tool for positive change” and asking “If for one day you had the power to make your [Watch]
UK artist and spoken-word performer Talia Randall’s seven-minute performance of her poem “Common Room” takes on an unpredictable new life as 13 recent graduates from Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem each add their own disparate and arresting animated sequences all assembled into one melancholy and affecting whole. [Watch]
The all-powerful CG/VFX team at Mikros Image in Paris help Evian and agency BETC extend the ubiquitous Baby & Me campaign with some tight Spidey moves. [Watch]
