» I, pet goat II by Heliofant

It's name comes from the short story George W. Bush was reading along, on the morning of September 11 of 2001, with a group of schoolchildren at Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota County, Florida. "The Pet Goat" from the book Reading Mastery II: Storybook 1 by Siegfried Engelmann and Elaine C. Bruner. 

This great short film is a "surreal" symbol orchestra on today's human condition. It’s packed with symbols of spiritual, philosophical and conspiracy matters remixed with our recent history and culture. The story is less of a narrative and more like an interpretive dance on America’s war on terror, religious fundamentalism, militarism, totalitarianism, deceitful media, exploitation, etc. If you are interested in a brief description of some characters you can visit the gallery section in Heliofant's site. 

Motion capture was used for about half the animation adding a much needed real touch to the surrealism and it's theatrical staging.

Heliofant is a new animation studio based in Montreal.

"HELIOFANT IS A NASCENT INDEPENDENT COMPUTER ANIMATION STUDIO FOCUSED ON CREATING EXPERIMENTAL AND CHALLENGING CONTENT. BRINGING TOGETHER ARTISTS FROM THE FIELDS OF DANCE, MUSIC, COMPUTER ANIMATION AND VISUAL ARTS, THE COMPANY IS VERY INTERESTED IN EXPLORING THE COMMON GROUND THAT UNDERLIES MANY SPIRITUAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL TRADITIONS IN A LYRICAL FORM."

The great driving score was created by Tanuki Project.

» Saam Faramand and Absolute's Blind Pig, NSFW

It's been a couple of months since this video came out, I was waiting for the right moment to make this post, but after the Cédric Blaisbois post I can post almost anything.

London based Partizan director Saam Faramand and Absolute's little brother Blind Pig created this clever orgiastic siamese video for the Klaxons track “Twin Flames”. He has chosen to execute his video with the use of motion control rigs and computer blending. Using techniques of the modern combined with inspiration from the old, Saam creates a wonderful homage to Brian Yuzna’s "Society" in this NSFW video for the band. This piece also highlights the current trend in directors being able to push the  boundaries.

» Cédric Blaisbois, NSFW

Cédric Blaisbois is a director and producer based in France. He works with Partizan, an award winning production company with offices in London, Paris, New York, Los Angeles, Berlin, Shanghai and Mumbai. The amazing thing, besides the raw, gore and violent images, is that he also did the vfx. I know that the night vision effect helps to cover some stuff, but the edition and vfx are really cool and well done. This music video for Huoratron´s track "Corporate Occult", under Last gang Records tells the story of an after hours drunken one night stand that becomes a blood feast soul massacre. Maybe a great analogy.

» National Parks Project, trailer

The National Parks Project (NPP) was created by Joel McConvey, Geoff Morrison and Ryan Noth, it was produced by FilmCan NPP Films and Primitive Entertainment in partnership with Parks Canada and Discovery World HD. This film is a collaborative art project that features 52 musicians and filmmakers from Canada, and 13 of its national parks. From May to October, 2010, the project sent different groups formed by one filmmaker and three musicians to a park in each province and territory of Canada, to capture their experience in a short film and soundtrack. The groups spent 5 days in the parks, exploring sights and sounds, collaborating on music and images. For now, you can watch 2 of the 13 pieces that conform this film in their website, check it out.

» Norman Fairbanks, Kraftwerk geo location based music generator app

Norman Fairbanks is a conceptual audio artist.  He says his mission is to freely alienate, process and melt artefacts from the panopticon of American mass media with found noise, selected field recordings and specifically generated electro-acoustic elements. His purpose is to investigate new tonalities in sound and create a context free, unbiased, neo-expressionist audio witness and reflection of contemporary American culture. While all this, he developed an interactive 24hrs music generator as an iphone app for Kraftwerk. It’s a system that creates music and sound based on realtime data depending on your geo location, the Kling Klang Machine No 1 differences from other generative music apps because most of them use preprogrammed algorithms and in this particular app they are continuously feeding. He says that for now the functionality is still basic but the original concept will be more and more implemented in future updates and releases. You can watch a demo here.

» CRCR

This video named "Todor & Petru" is the unofficial music video for The Thunderclaps "Judgment Day". It was made by Gobelins students Remi Bastie, Nicolas Dehghani, Jonathan Djob Nkondo, Nicolas Pegon and Jérémy Pires during an internship at Paris based WIZZ. They are known as CRCR, it's not clear if they are some kind of collective or studio but together they also created the "Jesus2000" animation 2 years ago, and the opening for the 2010 Annecy animation festival named "Junkspace". I was quite impressed with the combination of drawn animation and live action. It was done in such a way so that the piece has a cinematic style while retaining the organic and expressive qualities of drawn animation. It’s a worthwhile combo experiment. 

» NOVA documentary, 75min online premiere

A documentary film on new art and the young artists behind it. Directed by Isaac Niemand, and produced by Rojo, an independent creative organization, founded in 2001 by David Quiles Guilló, in collaboration with BossaNovaFilms, it was all filmed at Nova Contemporary Culture which happened in July and August 2010, in MIS-Museum of Image and Sound, and SESC Pompeia, in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Starring: Yoshi Sodeoka, Rebecca Ward, Tofer Chin, KRINK, Base V, Yochai Matos, Max Hattler, Lucy McRae, Kit Webster, Jimmy Joe Roche, Flavio Samelo, Matt W Moore, Zeitguised, Mulheres Barbadas, Gustavo Gagliardo aka Defi, Filippo Minelli, Quayola, Javier Longobardo, Renaud Hallée, Mark Jenkins, Ljudbilden & Piloten, Sosaku Miyazaki, Anna Taratiel aka Ovni, Robert Seidel, B. Fleischmann, Koen Delaere, Taras Hrabowsky, Cristopher Cichocki, Yusk Imai, to name a few.

Music by: Bradien, Roll The Dice, Fuck Buttons, to name some.

» Petra Mrzyk & Jean-François Moriceau

Working collaboratively since 1998, France based artists, designers and animators, Petra Mrzyk & Jean-François Moriceau are known for their detailed black and white ink drawings, their work surrounds the absurd, humorous, and even the perverse. With an ironic connection to commercial stuff, comics, and design, they have created their own vision on the contemporary visual culture. In their work, anything is possible and the surreal is their emblem. The have exhibit their work in several solo and collective shows around the world. You can watch some of their art works here. This is their latest music video, Sebastien Tellier´s "Look" clip, it's been a while since this but in case you haven't watched it or haven't heard about them I decided to make this post. I also recommend to watch Air's "Sing Sang Sung" and "don't be light" clips, some clever and detailed pieces. They also created this iphone app in collaboration with Sam Vermette for Recordmakers anniversary, it's free and it's fun.

» Kim Holm, Matta - Release The Freq

This is the official video for ¨Release The Freq" by Matta, from the album "Prototype" under AD Noiseam label. Kim Holm did direction, design, cinematography, editing, 3D and animation, pretty much everything. He created a poetic and  dreamy look, some great images, very beautiful to watch, unfortunately I had to watch it on mute.

» Orelha Negra - M.I.R.I.A.M. X Vhils aka Alexandre Farto

A couple of days ago I posted about Alexandre Farto and his portraits. He recently upload this music video for Orelha Negra.

» Kinetica Art Fair

The Kinetica Art Fair is produced by Kinetica Museum and is the first of its kind in the UK. It brings together galleries, art organisations and curatorial groups from around the world who focus on universal concepts and evolutionary processes though the convergence of kinetic, electronic, robotic, sound, light, time-based and multi-disciplinary new media art, science and technology. The fair provides an international platform for museums, collectors, curators and the public to view and buy artworks in this thriving and advancing field. This time, for 2011 a Kinetica feature exhibition and events programme explored the evolution of the human body, brain, mind and consciousness, it took place from the 3rd to 6th of February. It would have been great to attend, looks like this people from the 2010 exhibition were having a good time.

» Cultural democracy or mediocrity? PressPausePlay Trailer

"PressPausePlay, a film about fear, hope and digital culture". The digital revolution of the last decade has unleashed creativity and talent of people in an unprecedented way, unleashing unlimited creative opportunities. But does democratized culture mean better art, film, music and literature or is true talent instead flooded and drowned in the vast digital ocean of mass culture? Is it cultural democracy or mediocrity? This is the question addressed by PressPausePlay, a documentary film containing interviews with influential creators of the digital era. To name a few interviewees, Ted Schilowitz, founder, Red Digital Cinema Camera Company, Sean Parker, co-founder of Napster, Scott Belsky, CEO & founder, Behance. The film was shot globally between August 2009 – January 2011, covering more than 150 hours of interview footage with international creatives and thinkers - representing the state of digitized culture today.

» 360 music video, "Are We" by Craig Wedren, directed by Tim Nackashi

Former "Shudder to Think" frontman Craig Wedren has released a new solo album, "Wand", which doubles as an 360 interactive film directed by Tim Nackashi. This is not the first 360 music video ever made, the Black Eyed Peas released an Iphone and Ipad app to watch it but you had to pay for it (I guess they just don't have enough money yet). Nackashi says that he wanted to do something more multifaceted than the typical music visual experience, he wanted to conjure the surreal qualities of the 70s rock films with the technological amenities we have today, so he shot this 360 degrees video that allows viewers/listeners to choose their own perspective of each scene. He says he used his dslr to do some tests first, he stitched 15 frames per second all around (we techy geek visual guys call that spherical projections) and got a clue how he must do it, I guess the entire video is shot with dsrl's but he didn't specify on the article I just read. He has on his website a video with a planar projection of the 360 stitch in case you're interested. I think 3d stereoscopic images are now on it's "boom", but 360 degree video is relatively a new frontier, some guys at MIT media lab are doing some interesting stuff with different concepts. According to Wedren this video shows a hero on his journey through mundane life and cotidianity. Watch this interesting film/music video/augmented reality here.

» Shyscapes

Misha Shyukin created this shortfilm as his graduation project at FH Aachen University (Germany). He asks to watch his "short-art-movie-video-thingy" with your eyes half closed. The great soundtrack is "Tristana" by Nils Frahm.

» Surface Detail, Tom Beddard

Tom Beddard was born in London in 1976, he currently lives in Edinburgh working at 55degrees, a company specialized in interactive museum exhibits, video production and enterprise level systems integrations. This genius has a PhD on laser physics and a fascination with aesthetics of detail and complexity result of simple mathematical or algorithmic processes. He says his creative process is writing his own software and scripts to explore the resulting output in an interactive manner. He wrote a couple of Adobe Pixel Bender plugins to work with After effects and Photoshop to do this kind of 3d fractals, he has released 3d Mandelbulb Ray Tracer in his website, he says Mandelbulbs are a new class of 3d Mandelbrot fractals, "Unlike many other 3d fractals, the Mandelbulb continue to reveals finer details the closer you look." This Mandelbulb plugin is not compared with the quality and aesthetics you see in this piece, but his blog news says he is going to release this new plug soon! He also composed the soundtrack of this video and it's up for his fans here.
March 8, 2011 UPDATE: New Fractal Lab Web App, watch introduction video here.

» Sound of Noise, animated segment

Animated segment for the award winning feature film "Sound of Noise", directed by Ola Simonsson and Johannes Stjärne Nilsson. This piece was animated by Kristofer Ström and Martin Ottosson. This Swedish musical comedy portrays musicians as the ultimate outlaws, it's light on story but heavy on ingenuity. Despite its constant slapstick demeanor, it offers a fairly reasonable snapshot of the punkish anger that often drives experimental music. Very funny and fresh movie.

» The Sonic Wire Sculptor

The Sonic Wire Sculptor is one of several works that the musician Amit Pitaru made around 2003 to explore basic connections between sound and visuals. The "SWS" is a musical instrument which has been shown in museums and galleries world wide. A later version was created as a public installation where the SWS would be placed in the center of a room and connected to an 8-channel surround system. In every stop, the audience recorded their works into what has now become a library of thousands of sonic sculptors. In 2010 an iPhone version was created by Zach Gage with Amit's support. "The app is easily graspable and intuitive, allowing someone with no musical or drawing background to launch it and start exploring. At the same time SWS goes deep and encourages musicians and artists alike to explore new ideas in their craft". Check it out here http://sws.cc/index.html. Amit Pitaru has also developed a 3d drawing tool called Rhonda Forever, I think that if this software gets on the right hands or gets funds, it could be used as a platform to build more and change the future of 3d modeling and sculpting.

» Stefan Nadelman, 2.5d mastery among other things

Stefan Nadelman studied fine arts at Iowa State University in 1994, he began working in New York City as a print graphic designer, he transitioned to web design and then to web animation. In 2000, Stefan's first film, "Latin Alive" was included on the Best of Resfest DVD volume 1. By 2003, Stefan left the world of web-based animation for that of film and television. Shortly after, his next film, "Terminal Bar", won the Jury Prize for short film at the Sundance Film Festival. Among a variety of personal, collaborative, and commercial work, he has directed and animated shorts with Robert Smigel for Saturday Night Live's TV Funhouse, a music video for Menomena's Evil Bee, and the viral mini-epic short film about war called Food Fight. "I Say Fever" is the first video from the Ramona Falls debut album Intuit, under Barsuk Records. It was made beautifully by this talented artist, it has a fever-ish dreamy look and story.