Wim Crouwel Video

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>>> Watch the whole interview here

 

Weird Fishes : Radiohead meets Robert Hodgin

 

Ben Fry : Data Visualization

A talk by Ben Fry amongst others. 2008

>>> Watch Here

 

Design and the Elastic Mind

Certain events bring great change. In a time when emerging technologies seem to arrive everyday and the researcher is hiding less in the lab, there is more and more a need to open up discussion and debate on what is happening in design today and where it is taking us. MOMA brings together a remarkable palette of key designers, thinkers and researchers, their work and their ideas. The objective being to present the new fields of design and the people leading the way. Amidst nanotechnologies, biomimetics, information visualization, critical design…..the World of design is shifting scope and weight, playing more and more a major, perceivable, role in how we experience our environments, interact with objects and communicate with others. Many are loosing their firm stance during these seismic shifts, lets hope the exhibition at MOMA results in making the future a little clearer and comprehensible.

>>> View the exhibition contents here

 

Marvelous Mélies

Magic as a Means for Motion

The idea that magic could be an underlying driving force in artistic creation, especially in the domain of the moving image, may seem at first sight a far fetched thought and one that has little foundation. It is, however, a serious bundle of thoughts that have remained in a minute pocket of cellular space, ever since I came across the work of Michel Gondry back in 2006. It was during an editing session of an interview with Gondry that the name Méliès popped up regarding narrative in film. The forerunner of film narrative, Georges Méliès (1861 - 1938), had gained many a title in the history of cinema. It is perhaps his lesser talked about mastery of illusion however that leads us to a fascinating facet of the French innovator and one that links itself both to Gondry and a whole generation of film makers.

Creation of the moving image relies heavily on the capacity to manipulate images with editing, compositing and the use of special effects. Filming techniques that all have their origin in the work of Georges Méliès. Aside the technical implementation of such effects I wonder on the deeper level of creation and ask, is there a little magician in all of us then ? One who drives our desire to make images appear, disappear, animate or transform, helping us transcend reality and evoke the more magical realms of our imaginations ?

In the opening chapter of Elizabeth’s Ezra’ study on George Méliès, she describes the first (paying) public demonstration of the Lumière brothers cinématographe in Paris 23 December 1895. She particularly expresses the sheer awe, amazement and even fear amongst the public as they watched an ordinary Parisian street scene ‘come to life’ before their very eyes. The effect was magical, an illusion of the highest form, due in part to its ‘realism’ and in part to the public’s ignorance of the technology. It was however that very magical side that inspired the beginnings of a certain young man to take Lumière’s invention beyond simple scientific demonstration; one that gave us some of the first examples of the moving image as a means to tell stories based on our wildest imaginations. That particular event marked the beginning of Meliès’ career in cinematic storytelling. It was however not the beginning of his career as such.

Magic was a fundamental link to Méliès’ life and a strong link with how he would develop a narrative use of the Lumière’s cinematographe throughout his film making career. He had been drawn to the theatre at an early age, and more specifically to the art of conjuring. He had had the opportunity to attend shows by the great English illusionist John Nevil Maskelyne during a sojourn in London in 1884 and on his return to Paris later acquired the famous French illusionist Robert Houdin’s theatre which became his place of work as director and performing magician. After acquiring his first camera in 1896, he began filming his illusions and projecting his first films at the theatre. It was however a sudden turn of fate that would turn his little box of film into an immense box of tricks. A turn that would help him take illusion a step further.

There is a wonderful anecdote about Méliès and his ‘stumbling’ upon his first camera effect. Outside the wonderful Opéra in Paris, Méliès was one day carefully filming a typical street scene when suddenly his camera jammed for several minutes. He managed to get the film to work again and resumed filming. On viewing later, he realised that other subjects turned up suddenly on the screen at the time the film had jammed. This of course was due to the time lapse between the end and restarting of filming and which visually created a stunning effect of disappearance and sudden appearance of horse carriages and people. This little accident became known as ‘substitution splicing’ and was the start in a number of visual effects that Méliès was to develop: Superposition, matte, transparency and indeed editing. These techniques can be seen in a large number of his films: Un Homme de Têtes (1898), Affiches en Goguettes (1905) and Voyage dans la Lune (1902). Some of which had also taken direct inspiration from stage magic classics: Les Cartes Vivantes (1904).

These are today common video and image compositing techniques, the complexity of which, compared to Méliès’ time, have lost their sense in today’s push button society yet I believe have not lost their importance as a means for image manipulation, movement and ultimately storytelling. We are perhaps no longer dupe to illusion yet strangely this does not take anything away from our emotional involvement and indeed illusion often solicits our intellect to question the more bedazzling of effects in todays ‘eye candy culture.’ And that underlines the fact that the spectacle of illusion still does have power amid the spectator as it does essentially amid the creator. The technology of film is in fair share an extension of this desire, a desire to perform tricks and tricks that become part of the bigger story.

To return to the work of Michel Gondry, it can be noted that he uses a number of ‘artisan,’ home made techniques in his film. Everything from stop motion animation to make shift stage sets and mechanical contraptions, that strive not for realism but rather have more to do with the sense of the stage illusionist who wants to awaken the freer side of our imaginations, beyond the shackles of our practical realities. His mention of Méliès was perhaps more than just a historical wink at cinematic narration, it was also an acknowledgment of his own desire to perform magic on screen. And who has never wanted to perform a magic trick, whether it be to entertain or to understand the workings of the art of illusion.

There is currently a major exhibition on Georges Méliès at the Cinémathèque Française in Paris, along with the publication of two special edition box set dvds and a 350 page illustrated book. With an important presentation of newly acquired artifacts, this is the best exhibit there has been on an undeniably crucial figure of not only cinematic history but of creation of the moving image at large.

>>> Méliès at La Cinémathèque française

>>> Georges Méliès. The Birth of the Auteur. Manchester University Press 2000. Ezra, Elisabeth

 

The First Media Revolution

Stephen Fry and the Gutenberg Press. A wonderful, light hearted yet informative documentary on the invention of the printing press in true BBC journalistic style. You’d be foolish not to watch this in its entirety. We are after all talking about THE invention that has had the greatest effect on our cultures and sharing of knowledge.

 

Broadcast Design : BBC News

Lambie Nairn updates with a new motion graphic for the BBC News.

Lambie-Nairn has kept the red colour scheme but replaced the dark backgrounds in an attempt to brighten them.
The BBC asked audience members what they associate with its news, and Horrocks (Peter Horrocks, head of BBC Newsroom) says, ‘the characteristics that emerged included the globe and the colour red’.
He goes on to say the new designs have ‘taken those well-established attributes and emphasised them further and consistently in a set of designs that will apply across all of the BBC’s core news services – on TV across the UK and on the Internet’.
Source : http://www.designweek.co.uk

This rebranding however has caused quite a spark of comments on the editor’s blog for the BBC with some interesting insights into the design aspects of broadcast graphics.

Lambie-Nairn again surprises by opting for techniques that look rather dated and old-school. His style has always been to scale back the high-tech sheen and opt for simple flat designs. This amongst other things ushers in cheaper ways of creating on-screen graphics and widens the potential for VT editors to create well-branded graphics without expensive in-house designers overseeing the process. But he does it so stylishly.
Quoted from Tanglespider. Comment 149.

>>> Read the comments here

For those who are interested in taking the nostalgic road, watch ‘BBC News through the Ages’ which is a compilation of broadcast designs for the news channel since 1954.

>>> Watch the new national title design here

>>> Watch the new regional title design here

>>> More on the history of British TV Broadcast Design

 

Innovationsforum

Talk by Anthony Dunne

There is a shift in perspectives on what design is and its role in designing our future. This particular talk from Anthony Dunne above, presents not only a field of design that is gaining greater importance, he shows the underlying need for future designers to be able to extrapolate on deeper levels of thought.

More videos can be watched over at Vimeo from the Innovationsforum Interaktionsdesign conference which took place in Spring 2007.

>>> Presentation of Innovationsforum Interaktionsdesign
>>> Anthony Dunne at Royal College of Art

 

A NEW SKIN &…….

The blog gets a new ’skin’ ! Nothing fancy as I have yet to upgrade to something more professional but change is in the air. Indeed, Spring may not quite have arrived here in north-west Europe but I’m always a tad early when it comes to the Spring cleaning. The reason for change may well be uniquely some subconscious force. I like that reasoning - very French. There are of course underlying currents that come to mind as to why I decided to press all the correct buttons in WordPress and change the face of my research blog. I’ll spare you the details of justification however and finish this short entry with news that Motion Design has made some changes for the better and will continue to do so.

 

Microsoft’s Surface : Part 2

“Surface turns an ordinary tabletop into a vibrant, dynamic surface that provides effortless interaction with all forms of digital content through natural gestures, touch and physical objects. Beginning at the end of this year, consumers will be able to interact with Surface in hotels, retail establishments, restaurants and public entertainment venues. ” Press release 30 May 2007.

One year on from Microsoft’s announcement, AT&T will be pushing their mobile sales with the help of the World’s first commercially available tangible table.

Research on Surface dates back to 2001 with Stevie Bathiche of Microsoft Hardware and Andy Wilson of Microsoft Research convincing Mr. Jobs to develop the project. A first prototype appeared in 2003, built using an Ikea table and a sheet of architect vellum.

Microsoft hail the beginning of a great future for this kind of technology, and indeed with the various announcements of multi touch screens of last year and the birth of the iphone, it would appear this is where the future for another breed of screens is taking us. What this will mean for motion designers is a completely new rethink about how they work with image & text. It will no longer be about animating content in a communicative way across the screen. The designers of the future will be developing new skills, and they already are.

Interaction design is becoming an increasingly popular choice at schools and colleges and students are all hard at work designing their own Ikea tangible prototypes. Some already having took their creations beyond simple prototype - Reactable is a successful example.
Motion design has just got a whole more interesting and I’ll be keeping a close eye on the evolution of the image as interface and how this perspective will change the way motion designers will create for the screens of the future.

>>> Main Site & documents
>>> Why it took so long
>>> The essential list of interactive tables