Stash DVD Magazine (www.stashmedia.tv) is the monthly showcase for animation, VFX and motion graphics for the international design and advertising industry. Every edition is chockfull of ground-breaking commercials, broadcast design, music videos, virals, branded content, game cinematics, short animation films and background articles on software and technology. Stephen Price, chief editor of Stash Magazine, is our guide in the explosive supply. He selected two programmes featuring recent gems from Stash’s online archive, one with the best of 2011 and one with music videos. These TV commercials, music videos, virals, trailers, broadcast design and the occasional short self-promotional work offer an impressive cross section of current corporate animation. Powerful tools in combination with a clear vision and distinct pleasure in pushing boundaries yield a sparkling selection of recent productions.
BlinkInk director and all-round creative force Kristofer Strom (who stamped his name on pop culture with his hand-drawn YouTube phenomenon for Minilogue's 'Hitchhikers Choice', releases music through his solo project Ljubilden & Piloten, produces limited edition prints and posters and sustains a blog of his iPhone drawings) applies his hyperactive imagination to a video for West London electro duo 16bit.
American directing duo The Daniels continue to amaze audiences with this faux one-take mini-masterwork of finely orchestrated chaos plus the added bonus of a cameo by singer/composer/electro-deity Gary Numan
California director/editor David M Helman and London animator Russ Murphy team up across eight time zones push their own boundaries and deface a few musicians.
David M Helman: 'The artist (Blu) discovered an animated .gif that featured a girl's face with random doodling making her look like Satan, the character from Mad Magazine, etc., but it only ran on a loop for about three seconds. I thought it would be interesting if we did an entire video featuring this same effect over Blu's face while he performed.
Russ Murphy: 'It was an exciting prospect to doodle over three minutes of footage. I just went to work.'
David M Helman: 'I would say that the biggest challenge for me was we were animating out in London and I'm in CA, so it didn't allow me to be as hands-on as I usually am with my projects.'
Russ Murphy: 'For me the technical challenge was using the Wacom tablet and pen for the first time; I have managed to avoid it for a long time. Initially it felt like drawing in mud but quite quickly I got the hang of it. Another new thing that I'm now a fan of is using Photoshop to animate with. I'm a huge doodler and love drawing but for some reason I never managed to translate my style from paper into the computer before now. Learning these two very simple things gave me a tiny eureka moment. Expect a lot more hand-drawn animation from me in the future.
'The animation took roughly two months. It may not look complicated but drawing every frame is pretty time-consuming. There was a little bit of juggling other jobs and working nights along with working on holiday too (one week of this video got completed in a remote Devonshire cottage, quite a contrasting location to Los Angles where the artist is based and also the attitude of the song, I found this quite amusing). Luckily I had the help of Tsvetelina Tomova a talented young animator who animated a lot of the backgrounds and a real nice shot towards the end of the video.'
'BTW, during the whole process of making the video I kept seeing the time 11:11 on clocks and it was driving me mad, and somehow the video got finished on November 11/11 without even aiming too. David uploaded the video and sent me a mail telling me so, and when I looked at the time he sent the email it was 11:11 in the UK.
'I then thought wouldn't it be crazy of we got 11K hits on Vimeo before the 11.11.11 passed, and that's pretty much what it got: 11K something. When I told the guys Blu said the guy who mixed the record formed a company 11:11 to work on the record. Some freaky shit, or probably just coincidence. Your readers are gonna think I'm an oddball now.'
The 2011 album Rome brought together Danger Mouse (aka Brian Burton) and Italian composer/producer Daniele Luppi to create a title inspired by the spaghetti western soundtracks that had long influenced Burton.
Another two-worlds-colliding collaboration brings us this video for the Rome track 'Two Against One,' which features Jack White on vocals. The clip was directed by Chris Milk, known for his influential music video projects like Arcade Fire's Wilderness Downtown and the Johnny Cash Project, and respected 2D animator Anthony Francisco Schepperd.
The video, which broke on NPR, is in Schepperd's surreal, hand-drawn style, which contributes to the clip's dream-like narrative. The video is the latest chapter in Rome's beyond-CD story.
The Rome project always had filmic underpinnings-the album was even recorded in the studio that produced 'The Good, The Bad And The Ugly'-and it was formally announced last year that Milk was working on a film version, one that would incorporate beyond-cinema, trans-media elements. The feature film's story will be based around the apocalypse-themed novel 'The Reapers Are the Angels' by Alden Bell.
Last year, Milk worked with frequent collaborator Aaron Koblin on an interactive component of the Rome story, '3 Dreams of Black'.
Billboard described it as 'the most frightening video of 2011'...
UK director/animator Cyriak Harris twists the grey ordinary world in a piece of found footage into a beautifully choreographed crescendo of illusions in this video for Ninja Tune artist Eskmo premiered at the label's 20th anniversary party held in London in November 2010.
Cyriak Harris: 'The brief was to create a video along the same lines as my previous video 'Cycles'. The found footage I was using was quite short, so the main challenge creatively was thinking up of new ways to use the same piece of video over and over again. Transforming a still 2D video shot into a moving three dimensional space using predominantly 2D video editing software was also quite an interesting challenge.
'This was an unusual project because the way I was making it I couldn't show the clients any work-in-progress, so I was fortunate they trusted my artistic ability and were happy with the finished video.'
Director Ninian Doff worked with Fulton Lights on the music video for their track 'Sideways Glances and Coded Speech' so, according to the London-based director, when it came time for a new video, the band 'were happy to let me loose!'
'Strangely enough the initial creative challenge was finding a context which would sustain the crows-with-arms idea. I had the idea for a few months after noticing how much of a swagger crows had compared to other birds. I started laughing in the park when I realized how their super confident struts seemed so undermined by the fact they had no arms and embarrassingly (to my eyes) had to use their beaks â?? how desperately they clearly craved arms!
'I then wrote a few different ideas based on this â?? at one stage it was nearly a short film noir with crows as detectives. Then I got the track from Fulton Lights at the same time as I was obsessively watching old Tom Jones performances on YouTube and it suddenly clicked: an old school singer performance video - full of great dramatic hand points, waves and mimes.
'The confidence of the crows, combined with their unquestionable good fashion taste (all black tailored suits) fit perfectly into a fake 1960s performance video. I then also started thinking of 60s rock documentaries like 'Don't Look Back' and realized that style would also work great alongside it for paparazzi and fan footage.
'I don't think this video could have worked with any other type of bird; there's a style in a crow's movement which no other bird shares. This video wouldn't have had any of the energy and showmanship if it was pigeons with arms.
'A big technical challenge was obviously that my entire cast were unpredictable wild crows in the park. I actually scripted the whole video first before filming the crows, so it had a loose three-act structure â?? singer with drummer 'starting out', then achieving fame and success, then truly making it, finally leaving the park and bursting into full glossy music video.
'So when it came to filming in the park I had a long list with me saying things like 'drummer solo', 'drummer with singer', 'singer hi-5s fan', 'paparazzi start appearing', 'fans sing song on karaoke', 'singers run through crowd of paparazzi', 'journalist interviews singer'. This meant that even though the crows were unpredictable I knew what shots I had to find. The filming then actually went really well â?? it was easy to see what different behaviors would fit the different items on the list.
'The only big problem was filming the final part of the video where it suddenly leaves the park and explodes into a big glossy music video. I brought a big square of pink cardboard with me to the park to use as a greenscreen. We laid loads of bread in front of it planning to film some shots of crows we could key out. However crows are just too clever and wouldn't go near the screen no matter how much food we put in front of it. Pigeons were happy to eat it but crows are clearly very suspicious and they just flew off no matter how tempting the bribe.
'This meant the final shots became a lot more work then initially planned for. I played around with the rotobrush in After Effects CS5 for the final sequences but found it often got confused by the trees in the background and gave unreliable results â?? so I ended up just doing a lot of labor-intensive manual rotoscoping.
'The crows were shot on a Canon 7D using natural lighting, and the arms footage was filmed against a greenscreen on a Canon 5D. It was edited in Final Cut Pro and all the graphics work was done in After Effects and Photoshop. The entire film was made on a 3.06GHZ iMac.
'When filming the arms footage (performed by David Watson, a very funny actor and excellent filmmaker), it quickly became apparent the only way we could get the arms to look right was if the entire body was dancing and moving. This means I have incredible footage of David doing the most passionate crow impersonations, waddles and struts, which unfortunately will never be seen as I only used his arms! I've included some stills from the greenscreen shoot in the behind-the-cenes stuff so you can see what a full method-acting performance it was.
Such a sunny song from hiphop artist Gers Pardoel calls for a sunny music video! Let Gers take you along on his journey.
Mysterious French directing collective Megaforce won't reveal their names or any production details about their work but their star is on the rise having just completed the 'Charity Shop' spot for Cadbury and this wonderfully disturbing mix of 'Reservoir Dogs' and 'Roger Rabbit' for Is Tropical's new single 'The Greeks'.
Vincent Haycock, director at Logan's new live-action production company called Logan and Sons: 'My idea for this video was simple: I wanted to create a very organic, and nostalgic scene with a underlying digital decay, as if the real world was digitally created and is slowly falling apart, blurring the lines between what is real and fake.
'We shot everything practically, then roughly built and 3D tracked the environments and people. Once all the live-action and 3D were aligned we were able to control and effect the real world by augmenting and distorting the 3D underneath. The 3D team wrote a script that would allow each building in each shot to be distorted separately and to the beat. Most of the visuals we ended up using were a series of experiments that looked the best, or distorted in the most interesting way, it was like playing God to our weird little desert streets.'
Alexandre Courtes, director at division in Paris: 'There was no brief at all, I had the freedom to be as creative as I wanted. I just asked for the lyrics and went from what I understood. So i decided to go for vanities and the eternal repetition of life and interpretations.
'I had a huge stack of references and I wanted them to be linked together as a continuous trip. The challenge was to film most of it for real and then to edit the mountain of footage, because we shot a lot!'
Head of post Guillaume Marien at Mathematic in Paris: 'We created all the SFX for this epic video, starting with a three-day motion control shoot. We then composited the band, naked women, skulls, smoke and lots of other unexplained elements with a host of 3D objects such as pyramids, crosses, planets and bodies.
'A lot of time was invested in making the movements smooth and rhythmic as the film relentlessly moves us forward.'
Nico Uthe, art director and motion designer in Hamburg: 'The German rap artist Samy Deluxe asked us to create a music video for his song 'Poesiealbum'. A poesiealbum is a kind of black book usually used for poetic content.
'Our aim for the rap part was to visualize the lyrics as motion graphics inside the book, but we wanted to do that in many different ways and styles. We tried not to visualize every word directly; at many parts the sense is hidden, so viewers normally won't realize every meaning by watching the clip the first time. Sometimes it's kind of a picture puzzle.
'Samy Deluxe is famous for being the fastest rapper in German-speaking countries. So it was kind of hard to find good ideas for illustrating and visualizing his lyrics and especially for creating good transitions in between. Fortunately, we received some help from the graphic guys at Typeholics.
'Our aim was to make all the motion graphics look realistic. Even the way the graphics build up are supposed to look authentic. I guess this was the biggest challenge of the project.
Director/animator Adrien Merigeau in Dublin: 'I met Conor J. O'Brien, the singer/composer of Villagers before starting the project and we just came up with options. One suggestion was to do something close to the color palette of Villager's album cover, designed by Conor himself. We talked about experimentation, Kenneth Anger, the philosophical message behind the song, where the lyrics came from, but it was all very open and communicative.Â
'I suppose the biggest creative challenge was to design visuals that look finished and appealing with a minimum of drawn elements, as the song is very long, so I had to keep it simple and fast to do. I really wanted to draw everything on paper and have everything move at all times, because the technique is quite rough (inks, paint, color pencils), the moving characters didn't sit well with the still backgrounds. It was tricky to be so bare visually. Technically it was pretty basic, only the three panning rooms were a bit tricky, but it's just many 3D layers in After Effects.
Schedule:Â 'I had from mid-january until end of May to do everything. Eimhin McNamara joined in to do the stop-motion scenes over the last month of production. It was mostly done in evenings and weekends.
'I wanted to make a music video for Villagers for years. They're one of the best bands in Ireland and they're super lovely people. Two years ago I got to talk to someone from the band, I mentioned that I'd be happy to make a music video for them, but I just looked like a nervous child to him so of course he just chuckled.
A few months later I even sneaked in the backstage area at one of their gigs and dropped Conor a DVD of a short film of mine. But that night someone else had also sneaked in backstage to give Conor a portrait of himself, so maybe by association my short film was just as weird. Then over a year later I heard that Irish animation studio Cartoon Saloon were asked to make a music video for Villagers, and I got really jealous. But Cartoon Saloon couldn't do it, they recommended me, and that's how it worked out. It was a really great day.'
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