Motion Graphic Designer: A Misunderstood Profession PART6

In Response to Reading David O’Reilly’s ‘So What Do You Do?’

There are obvious advantages to being the director; instant recognition, that ‘ooh’ factor at cocktail party presentations, credentials that evoke glamor and prestige, hovering in the realms of the halls of fame. The director is historically linked with the epic, the cinematic, it is a title that beholds a certain grandeur, one of the major 20th century artists. The reality however for many so called ‘directors’ today reveals a rather more sober perspective. Convention amongst many of the motion design studios and freelancers to mushroom point towards a completely different and perhaps milder more diluted role and indeed to the extent that the term director has become a title for the one man show.

Anyone can ‘take on the role’ of a whole production company these days – we all have the possibility to change our professional caps every 30 minutes of the day. There are considerable examples of quality work that rises from out of the blue screen bedroom studios where a single talent can write, design, film, animate, composite, mix and broadcast their work. Wearing these multiple caps however does not necessarily qualify oneself within the field. The term director, as O’Reilly points out ‘is such an umbrella term, it ceases to describe anything meaningful’. Walk through the corridors of a number of ’boutique’ studio set ups these days and practically everyone you meet is a director. Doesn’t the fact that many commercial projects today find their direction through a sole creative force and approach make us question the use of the title director? It may be a customary convention but isn’t it misleading?

So what do you do? There certainly is a need to think carefully about one’s professional title and have the sincerity to attribute the correct one. Which one? In the domain of motion design where motion (graphic) designer seems to have been dropped for the more esteemed director, I’d like to see a rectification. Your job title is perhaps but a general term but it can only have the weight of meaning via collective understanding of what that title entails. When I have back ache, I may go to see the osteopath but not the dentist or hematologist. If I’m not aware of that information, I can’t respond correctly. If we take on professional titles in a lax manner, we dilute and ultimately denigrate professions. It is not a simple choice of giving oneself a name, it is a conscious and sincere effort of working within a line of work and ultimately respecting your position and experience, whether you be artist, designer, editor, props man, BG layout man, animator, foley artist, in-betweener, chief animator, first assistant director, 3D modeler, ……

>>> Read David O’Reilly’s ‘What Do You Do?’

 

Goodbye GUI Hello Gesture

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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.

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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?

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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.”