Cheetahs on the Edge

I'm not going to go into much detail here, the film pretty much says it all. It's some added content from a National Geographic documentary.

Thanks to JoePoe who linked to this over at the Newtek forums.

Edouard Salier, Director, artist.

This is a beautiful piece of commercial work for a postage/delivery company. It's the old unfolding paper trick but done really well, just a delight with the camera moves and bubbling music score.



La Poste _ Pliages Agency: BETC Director: Edouard Salier Producer: Mourad Belkeddar Production Company: Iconoclast Post producer: Clement Pignal Post-production company: Digital District Art Direction : Marthe Salier & Francois Peyranne Music: Amadou & Mariam _ Sabali

Yellow

I really love these Vsauce videos, I like everything about them, the bold way they are shot and edited, the cut and thrust of the graphics and the nerd-o-matic sound design, I even like the gooy logo design at the end.




I haven't even mentioned the best part, content.

Monstruum Art Exhibit - M2 Gallery

 

Some friends of mine who I've lost touch with are exhibiting next month. They are the art team known as SCAR and they're putting up work at the M2 gallery in Surry Hills. I'll be going along to see what's new, their stuff can be disturbing to the wrong kind of mind, if you like monster freaks and solid line work you should come along.

A Conversation with the Filmmakers of "To The Last Drop" at SIFF

I want to follow up with some news to a previous post, I'd announced that Bill McGuire (a fellow Sydney mo-graph and effects artist) had won a number of awards for his short film "To The Last Drop" and he was off to the states for it's screening at the Sedona International Film Festival. Bill tells me he's been having a amazing time over there, partying every night and other adventures. Here's a short interview with the filmmakers during the festivities.



Congratulations guys.

Gizmodo. Life In The Movie Business

An interesting article  in Gizmodo about the current state of play in the crumbling VFX industry. The posted comments to the piece are also interesting in giving a feel of the sentiment out there.

Monovich. Above the Clouds.

There's a pretty strong cool factor in doing motion graphics at 30 thousand feet. The artist known as Monovich did exactly that on a return trip from New York. This is not news, it happened a few years back but I'll never let currency stand in the way of exposing good work, so here is the result of a little experiment done while on that flight. He shot the footage, put it through his laptop and played with expressions. No actual key frames were harmed in the making of this video.



The pointy things were made with the "Beam" effect, the magnified spots use "Magnify".

" I shot some clouds and tried to learn some expressions stuff in After Effects before my battery died. No key frames (except for the trackers), but lots of random expressions. Radium Audio was kind enough to compose some original sound for the experiment..." Stephen Fitzgerald a.k.a. Monovich

This marks the second time Radium Audio has been mentioned in Just Add Motion, it would take skill to put sound to this, it actually feels like the sound is generating the moves which is not the case.

Gears explained. The transmission of power.

Continuing with the examination of mechanical motion, we get a very clear explanation of the principals in this 1930's film. The presentation is well done and illuminating, worth ten minutes of your time if you want to understand these things.

Mechanisms in Motion

Let's take a look at motion, nice smooth mechanical motion. These videos provide some insight into how simple principals can be built up into very sophisticated motion. The simplest motion mechanism that humans first developed (the wheel) is the one that most mechanical motion is built upon, yet as the level of complexity in these mechanisms increases, we start to get organic motion that very closely mimics nature. Nature doesn't use wheels much, pivots, fulcrums or centrifugal forces yes, but actual spinning wheels? That's man's invention, and look what we can do with it.






Gears and cables can do a very good job at replicating human and animal type motion, even if it's just at a surface level.

Why, Man of Mystery

 " Coders are today's rock stars" Will.I.Am

I read this story some time last year and had to go searching again to find it . Since this blog deals with the subject of digital and analogue design, I thought it would be nice to link to a piece of recent history verging on folklore. An interesting read.