Goodbye GUI Hello Gesture

………….

To an applications programmer, the shift to gestural input is as big as the shift to the mouse was twenty-five years ago. It’s both exciting and a little daunting. The g-speak input framework allows direct, either-handed, multi-person manipulation of any pixel on any screen you can see. Pointing is millimeter-accurate from across the room. Hand pose, angle, and position in space are all available at 100 hertz, with no perceptible latency and to sub-millimeter precision.
(Quoted from oblong.com)

Oblong is a company that was set up in 2006 and whose principal work and research has been in a new spatial operating environment entitled g-speak. This new technology give pixel precise manipulation of multiple screens via hand gestures. And before images of Mr Cruise flapping his arms around pop in to your heads, the link is perfectly apt. According to Oblong’s website, one of Oblong’s founders served as science advisor to Minority Report and based the design of those scenes directly on his earlier work at MIT.

………

Building g-speak is a design exercise at three levels. Most obviously, there is a new graphical computing environment — a new look and feel, in our industry’s argot. Those graphics are inseperable from an architecture that motivates and produces them. Finally, we design and use applications that run on top of this foundation.

I wonder to what extent the ramifications of such a change in interaction with the computer will have on software tools for the future and indeed how we think about design with these tools. Could we for example envisage 3D modeling within such a system? The artist literally sculpting images. Funny, for some odd reason, Patrick Swayze comes to mind and that seminal sequence in Ghost. Joking apart, and beyond the obvious wow factor to this technology, I’m interested to see how such interactions take shape. Are we really on the verge of adopting another form of interaction or is this a little too close to science fiction film for it to be of practical use on a larger scale?

>>> More Info Here
>>> Watch Video Here

 

Pablo Biopic – News

I wrote about Pablo, the feature length documentary earlier last year. News is that the film will be ready for 2010. In the meantime you can catch up on developments over at the completely new website dedicated to the film’s production. There is also a brief interview you can watch over at Reelz Channel with Pablo Ferro and the documentary director Richard Goldgewicht.

>>> Watch the short interview here.
>>> The new website for further info on the documenrtary

 

R/GA Historical Reel 1977 – 2008

If there is one company that has had an influence on motion graphics for film and especially within opening titles, then it must be R/GA. With over 30 years experience R/GA had set out to renew title design after a sluggish time during the 70′s.

“Their firm was among the first to approach film-title design as a collaboration of creative talent and technology. The firm broke new ground…. It also generated many technical innovations that changed the industry and was fertile breeding ground for outstanding talent in film and television design” , Curran

>>> Watch the Reel

 

Learning Processing

Image by tisane. 2008

Daniel Shiffman has recently put online the examples for his book, Learning Processing. Its an elementary book that has the fortune of a scholar to guide the layman through the rudiments of the object orientated programming language, Processing. Shiffman has a knack for simplicity and thorough pedagogy which enables even the least logical of us to progress and gain access to an unfamiliar means of creation. Programming and software development for image making, animation, interactive works and data visualization is becoming increasingly accessible and is proving to be an added tool for artists and designers of the future.

>>> Read More Here.

 

Motion Graphic Designer: A Misunderstood Profession PART 5

PART 5 Motion Graphic Designer: A Misunderstood Profession

©Pyramyd Editions 2008

** If you are having problems listening with the above audio player, you can directly download the mp3.
>>> Download

Adrian Shaughnessy is a self-taught graphic designer based in London. He spent 15 years as creative director of Intro, the design studio he co-founded. He left in 2004 to pursue an interest in writing and to work as a freelance consultant. Until spring 2007, he was consultant creative director of This is Real Art. Today he runs ShaughnessyWorks, a studio combining design and editorial direction.(Design Observer)

Shaughnessy was interviewed back in 2007 and gave a most generous insight into the more wider realm of the ‘moving image’ and its implications in the digital era. He develops various arguments to explain his view of how digital moving image culture and creation has a new syntax and language, divorcing itself further from traditional film. The epic, as well as our national broadcast systems has fallen to a D.I.Y. culture that is proving to be a dominant force and one that has a completely open means of distribution:

“Its a new electronic democracy. The user is much more participatory.”

However, Shaughnessy is not shy to express his fears for this new medium that is under ” a lot of pressure from commercial interest…..I think that the moving image’s biggest threat comes from commercial exploitation.”

Later in the interview, he remarks on how electronic music has parallels with what is happening in the moving image culture. Even though electronic music via the Internet has been less hampered by commercial forces, it shares a similar D.I.Y. culture and one that has created a wider audience.

 

Future Trends: Getting More Tactile (and Dirty)

Romantic Justice Pierre Vanni 2008

If the beginning of last year held promise for new tactile technologies and the development of interactive applications. (Most of which have found home on that fruit labeled phone). This year has the potential to return to the basics albeit with some added sheen. I was pleasantly surprised to come across Amid Amidi’s latest blog post, Animation Trends: 3-D Papercraft/Cut-out Animation in which he states an explosion in this more hands on animation technique. The post immediately brought to mind 1st Ave. Machine’s latest commercial, ‘Unboxed’ recently commented over at Motionographer. The ‘trend’ is indeed a return to some of the more traditional approaches in animation which is a pleasant surprise for those who hailed a 100% digital future and perhaps a relief too for the budding student who just can’t get their neuron’s connected with ray tracing. But where does this sudden interest in a new approach stem from?

/////////

There were pointers to this happening as early as 2007. Producers and creatives were already talking about picking up the pencil again and getting fingers stuck to paper. One interesting example of this was the new section added to last years onedotzero festival called top draw: A fine selection of films that “serve as a direct counterpoint to the more technologically driven moving image and visual code generators.”

© Studio Hort

Even amongst the most dedicated digital creators, there has been a growing interest in the design ‘object’ and the more tactile qualities of the final creation. Generative artist, Marius Watz recently stated that his “biggest ambition right now is to escape the screen and take my work into physical space.” (Varoom Issue 08 November 2008).

Frozen 087 Marius Watz: Sound memory (Oslo Rain Manifesto)

What is essential and what I found particularly interesting from a motion design perspective, is that a lot of what bubbles up to the surface as ‘trends’ of the moment in motion, often has its genesis in design and graphic design well before we pause to comment. 2007/8 has already seen quite a shift towards more ‘physical space’ works, especially with typography and this seems to have trickled into the motion arena as a ‘new’ approach and one that has been given an added layer of computer wizardry with some outstanding results – Johny Kelly’s supreme Seed and Julian Vallée’s brilliant Globo Logos

 

Robert Breer – Screening Room 1976

Image taken from Recreation 1956

“Breer’s early work was influenced by the various European modern art movements of the early 20th century, ranging from the abstract forms of the Russian Constructivists and the structuralist formulas of the Bauhaus, to the nonsensible universe of the Dadaists. Through his association with the Denise René Gallery, which specialized in geometric art, he saw the abstract films of such pioneers as Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling, Walter Ruttman and Fernand Léger. Breer acknowledges his respect for this purist, “cubist” cinema, which uses geometric shapes moving in time and space.” Jackie Leger

“Breer has restlessly investigated the single frame technique….He has explored new perceptual threshholds with his rapid montage technique, pioneered in the collage film, and experimented with the dynamics of pure abstract animation.” Russett & Starr. 1976

In an early interview at the Screening Room, Robert Breer explains his evolution from painter to film maker. From his background in ‘cartooning’ as a kid and later as a commercial artist for the army, Breer moved to Paris in the 1950′s where his interest in film developed “as an extension of (his) painting”. This excerpt from the Screening Room also includes one of his early experimental films, ‘Recreation’, 1956

>>> Watch Here
>>> Watch more of Breer at UBU

 

Substance Over Style

Image from The Fundamentals of Typography. G. Ambrose & P. Harris

Boards magazine published online their round table on motion graphics with a selection of important figures in the field. It’s an interesting read for those working within the commercial market and hints at the slight malaise that seems to have set in during 2008 around the notion of motion graphics. A malaise that has root in part with a general misunderstanding in the field and which I have recently undertaken to discuss. Let 2009 help dissipate some of those misconceptions and let us see the work bloom beyond and above the commercial bind.

BOARDS: Where do you see your companies evolving in the next year or two, and the discipline of motion design?

JAMES PRICE: … In terms of the motion graphics industry, I’d like to see it move away from the way it’s been perceived. But when I think of the breadth of work from the people on this call today, there are a lot of places that motion graphics can go. So we have to be careful about not shooting ourselves in the foot with the work we produce. We should be creating work that has its own inherent visual style.

JAKE BANKS: For some reason, there is this stigma around the term motion graphics now. For us, I’d like us to be thought of as more of an ideas shop

BOARDS: About that stigma you’d mentioned… how did it get to that point, and how do you counter that perception?

JAKOB TRÖLLBACK: There were times when the shop of the day was whichever one came out with the next cool technique. And that can be exciting when it happens but it sensationalizes things. It stops being about ideas and more about the technology.

JAMES PRICE: I think it’s about embracing the diversity within our group. We have to get to the point where people are looking to us for ideas and not just style.

>>> Read the full article here

 

Motion Graphic Designer: A Misunderstood Profession PART 4

PART 4 Motion Graphic Designer: A Misunderstood Profession

Excerpt from an interview conducted in 2006 by Designflux ©Pyramyd Editions 2009

** If you are having problems listening with the above audio player, you can directly download the mp3.
>>> Download

Rick Poynor founded Eye magazine in London in 1990, edited it for seven years and is now its resident columnist. He writes the “Observer” column for Print magazine and he has written about design, media and visual culture for Blueprint, Icon, Frieze, Domus, I.D., Metropolis, Harvard Design Magazine, Adbusters, The Guardian, The Financial Times, and many other publications. (Design Observer)

In this short interview, Poynor reveals the problematic of defining motion design but also links the discipline with his personal interest in film. He focuses mainly on movie titles, talking with poignant ease about a number of works and eventually opening up to discuss deeper thoughts on the evolution in spectator literacy of the moving image:

“The audience has become enormously sophisticated…….you can produce imagery, that actually once would have been avant-garde imagery, and the audience can piece together these little bits of narrative implication to construct a whole scenario.”

He continues to develop on the various techniques that are used in digital film today, hinting that greater abstraction, symbolism and more graphic elements have their place and that “….the audience is ready.”

 

Motion Graphic Designer: A Misunderstood Profession PART 3

Image taken from Hybrid

Animation vs Motion

Animation is an incredibly versatile and flexible means of expression and one that has become perhaps the most cross-disciplinary of all mediums within the moving arts today. It has come a long way from its humble beginnings as a means for artistic expression and story-telling. It is now clearly an advanced medium and mixture of techniques allowing not only the possibility to exist alone and entertain on a feature length level, but also act as a means to seamlessly integrate with live action to the extent that the real and the modeled are utterly indistinguishable. The borders have become so blurred within this hyper reality that even making a distinction between what is an animated and a live action shot film seem pointless. The purists stand firm to their beliefs that if not animated within a ‘traditional’ framework, then it just isn’t animation (see discussion at Cartoon Brew on motion capture). However, beyond the technical advancements and their validity, animation has for me two clear sides to the creative coin: Genre & technique. The important point to retain here is that genre stems from an industry firmly linked with character driven story-telling and film tradition. Its beginnings, as we are all aware, date from the Disney empire back in the early part of the twentieth century. Technique on the other hand is what has given rise to other ‘forms’ of the medium that either stand alone as early abstract works or, as I have mentioned, become a modeled part of the bigger picture. It is rather a means to an end whereas ‘animation as genre’ is indeed the whole package and the end result.

Where then could we fit an idea of motion graphics within this framework? Well, put simply, it uses animation as a technique. It is however not solely a technique but a new form of animation with its own unique visual language; one that does not take root in character driven narrative nor does it adhere to traditional filmic language. This new language draws predominantly from graphic design and the more experimental boundaries of art. If we take a closer look at the production of most animated films or series these days, apart from the developments in technology, the actual artistic and directive process has remained very similar to those of the early days: Animation within its context as a genre depends on strong character design and the ability to bring the character alive through movement, dialogue and eventually emotion. The key to good animation remains strong scenarios and strong characters that need to be designed within the context of the story line and in line with particular design and technical issues. These key points of procedure and production have been and still are the basis of all good animation schools and training.

Motion graphics however resides on formal issues of shape, colour, composition and typography. The design issues are focused foremost on context and communication where style follows and never dictates. I prefer to see motion graphics as a mode. It is neither genre nor simply technique: Not genre because it does not have the historical nor professional weight. Nor just technique, because it has a language of expression and communication that goes far beyond that of simple execution of sequential image making. Motion graphics is something new.

>>> Read an earlier article on this subject: Mode vs Genre