adventures in motion

inspiration

marc0tt — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 08:43:29 +0000

MK12

marc0tt — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 18:41:30 +0000

MK12 is a design and filmmaking collective based in Kansas, Missouri.The company was founded in 2000 by Timmy Fisher, Ben Radatz, Matt Fraction, Shaun Hamontree, Chad Perry and Jed Carter, who met at the Kansas City Art Institute. They are best known for creating the title sequences for Stranger than Fiction and Quantum of Solace. Other noteworthy works include the title sequence for The Kite Runner, animated sequences for The Beatles: Rock Band.

http://www.mk12.com/

http://www.vimeo.com/channels/mk12

Stranger than Fiction:

Quantum of Solace VFX:

The Kite Runner Title:

The Beatles: Rock Band

Project Three – Too Much Studying

marc0tt — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 19:13:44 +0000

Rationale

The idea was to create a loop around pages flipping. I wanted to give the feeling of frustration when studying and how information almost becomes the same with every flip of the page. It was a little trickier to match the ends to create a seamless loop because I have to make sure that the pages on both the left and right side doesn’t skip. On my test shot, the page on the left was obviously changing every time the page flips so I tried to fix it by changing the opacity.

Test shots

loop idea

marc0tt — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:07:49 +0000

Here are some collages that could work when combined with the idea of panoramic loop in my previous post. i could insert loops as part of a collage so it will become a mix of motion and static images.

Cool Loop

marc0tt — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 05:27:34 +0000

Panoramic view made up of smaller loops. Cool idea =)

Project 2 – Ten/Joo

marc0tt — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 04:28:01 +0000

Design Statement

This is a stop-motion animation video for the academy leader countdown. I decided to go with just using the Japanese symbols and pairing it with visual cues of the number instead of fusing the Japanese and English numerical system like what I had first intended. I was inspired by Japanese paper craft so I gathered different kinds of paper in order to make something colourful and playful.

The storyboard was essential for the animation part of this project. I sometimes have to work backwards, where I would set up the final frame for the scene and move the objects accordingly afterward. These worked for scenes that involved some dismantling of objects like the scene for number 9 where I had to roll the paper and 7 where I had to pull the strings. I used AfterEffects to place the photos in order and animate the transitions. I tried using a paper swoshing sound effect to replace the blips but I found it distracting as it sometimes doesn’t go with the animation and the images so I ended up using the blips instead.

Process and Storyboards:

storyboard

set up of the shoot

Project 2 – Final Project Brief

marc0tt — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 03:26:26 +0000

Ten / Joo

Overview: The idea for this countdown was to count using Japanese characters. Using Japanese paper craft as inspiration and stop-motion animation, the idea was to visually communicate the Japanese characters in English using visual symbols (ie: 10 pins for 10, 9 stripes for 9, 8 squares for 8 and so on)

Intended Audience: Being interested in the Japanese language myself, I figured it would be interesting to do a countdown in Japanese so this is for people who want to briefly learn how to count in another language.

Key Message: Japanese symbols from 10-3

Content: Main content is paper! tissue paper, japanese paper, wrapping paper, plain white paper, origami paper. Other content includes pins, streamers and yarn.

Bibliography:

Chiyogami: A Kaleidoscope Of Patterns, http://pingmag.jp/2008/07/24/chiyogami/

Visual/Concept References

paper craft

chiyogami paper

More type stuff…

marc0tt — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 19:23:09 +0000

i shouldn’t focus on this too much but there are some playful type techniques that I can see being animated such as:

Paper typography by Elin Svensson

A typography work using elastic bands by Edward Nugent

gaffer tape art in tokyo train stations

more tape art

Animation Ideas

marc0tt — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 05:05:02 +0000

these are all stop motion and child-like but if I continue with the toypography idea of blocks and toys, then this is the look or aesthetic that i’ll go with.

and another idea for an aesthetic is the japanese bento boxes! some people get really into decorating them so maybe i can use them for my countdown

Countdown Ideas

marc0tt — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 04:41:35 +0000

My idea for the countdown leader was to count in Japanese. I’ve been fascinated with Japanese culture and I’ve tried to learn the language so I thought it will be cool to do the countdown using Japanese characters. There are a few challenges that I have when doing this countdown leader in another language. The biggest challenge is that I have to be able to still communicate the idea of a countdown leader (as opposed to the video appearing to be just some text in Japanese). Second is that need to figure out what kinds of symbols i’m going to use (Japanese has 3 – kanji, hiragana, katakana) and well, I need to figure out how I’m going to animate it!

Here are some inspirations and ideas to get me going:

At Johnson Banks, one of the things they’ve done is fuse English with Japanese by using the phonetic Japanese typeforms, which is katakana and spelling them out phonetically. They called this phonetikana. Here are some examples to illustrate the idea:

soo - pa hee - roh / superhero

toh - poo ba - na - na / top banana

Dainippon Type Organization has interesting projects that experiments with Japanese typography, some of them combining hirgana and katakana.

overlaping katakana with hiragana

They came up with toypography, which is a set of blocks that can be used to build different sets of characters, in this example the word fish is communicated in three different ways:

fish

sakana, meaning fish

or a symbol of a fish! =)

These ideas of combining letterforms and languages definitely give me something to think about in terms of solving the problem of communicating the countdown leader in both english and japanese. Will post execution soon!