The day there was no news.

   Post from: Motionographer

Very impressive line-up for the upcoming PSST!3. This year’s edition will showcase no less than 17 films! Expected release, September 2008

   Post from: Motionographer

Fun viral for Net 10: Proof that cell phone companies are evil

   Post from: Motionographer

Important Looking Pirates and Visual Art for Viasats

   Post from: Motionographer

The students of Gobelins never fail to impress. “Blind Spot” isn’t new, but it has been nominated as a Best Student Piece for SIGGRAPH 2008. And with good reason. The technical and artistic strengths of the film’s creators all dovetail brilliantly, making for a tightly packed narrative that’s full of detail and comedic irony.

“Blind Spot” was created by Johanna Bessiere, Nicolas Chauvelot, Olivier Clert, Cecile Dubois Herry, Yvon Jardel and Simon Rouby.

   Post from: Motionographer

zspace gets their game on for Fox Sports (Thanks, Faruk!)

   Post from: Motionographer

Foreign exchange expletives from Gringo (NSFW)

   Post from: Motionographer

French motion director Slim (a.k.a. Aniss Slimane) poured a heaping helping of color and sunshine into this whimsical music video for 80s pop star Richard Gotainer. As silly and free-spirited as the illustrations are, there are some quite beautiful compositions throughout, giving the piece as unexpected dash of slickness that I like.

I won’t comment on the music or Mr. Gotainer’s performance except to say that I find them both wildly entertaining. Apparently, Mr. Gotainer wrote the song to promote the joys of vacationing in the Champagne region of France. Based on this video, it looks like maybe Mr. Gotainer didn’t quite have enough to time to shoot on location. Ah well, c’est la vie. A green screen and some CG can do in a pinch.

If you just couldn’t get enough Richard Gotainer from this video (and who could?), there’s more in store on YouTube.

Thanks to Cyril Drouin for the tip!

Credits:
Direction, production, art direction and animation : Slimane ANISS
Director of Photography : Pierre-yves BASTARD
Animation : Nicolas HU
Illustration : Charles BIGEAST, Nicolas TUAL
Agency : Horizon bleu Didier JANOT, yannick MERRAND
Executive production : 555lab Noordine FAYEK

   Post from: Motionographer

David Kamp: Music & Sound Design

   Post from: Motionographer

I recently stumbled onto an interesting site from Lee Brimelow called gotoandlearn.com. While it’s essentially a tutorial site, it also gives you some great new peeks into the upcoming Flash Player 10 release from Adobe.

Ever since Flash 6, when embeddable video was made possible, Flash has been on a collision course with broadcast quality motion graphics. I’ve written before (here and here) about the increasing overlap between After Effects and Flash and what this might mean for designers (and developers). It’s no secret that I’m excited about the sea change we’re experiencing.

But now I’d like to geek out and share some of the fun new technical bits about “Astro,” the codename for Flash Player 10. My favorite is the ability to dynamically generate sound, as seen in this tutorial. It’s something that Processing has been able to do pretty much since its inception, but no distributable web technology has the reach (both in terms of developer community and penetration) of Flash. I’m hoping this added ability will attract new experimenters to the happy land of dynamic audio/visuals.

Another interesting new addition is native support for 3D (another demo here), something people have been clamoring about for some time now. Papervision3D has done a great job filling that gap, but now with “official” support, I’m hoping we see even more craziness.

Lastly, though perhaps most importantly, increased efficiency in the runtime drawing engine and other general performance boosts mean more real-time manipulation of video elements. With more and more cutting edge sites already pushing Flash to full-screen extremes, I can only imagine what’s next. As always, I’ll keep my eye on The FWA.

By the way, I don’t recommend installing FP10 beta yet, unless you don’t mind some bugginess and/or you’re a hardcore Flash geek. I had to uninstall it after running into some issues with WordPress.

(In the interest of full-disclosure: Adobe is a sponsor of Motionographer, but this post was in no way initiated or endorsed by Adobe. I did it all by myself.)

   Post from: Motionographer