Doll Face

A machine with a doll face mimics images on television screen in search of a satisfactory visage. Doll Face presents a visual account of desires misplaced and identities fractured by our technological extension into the future.

Street Fighter

this trailer has got me all worked up about the game, as a SF veteran, this game possess many high expectations. as a piece of motion graphics it's just beautiful!

Similar Diversity

a project by Philipp Steinweber and Andreas Koller

Similar Diversity is an information graphic which opens up a new perspective at the topics religion and faith by visualizing the Holy Books of five world religions. Communalities and differences of Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Judaism are shown up in this datavisualization.
The visual's basis is an objective text analysis of the Holy Scriptures, and works without any interpretations from the creators' side. Despite - or even because of this abstraction, the artworks are not only working on an informal but also on an emotional level. The viewers should be inspired to think about own prejudices and current religious conflicts.

Realised with Processing and VVVV.

Similar Diversity was exhibited at the Hangar-7, Salzburg: Is it possible to touch someone's heart with design? by Multimediaart and Stefan Sagmeister.

Stefan Sagmeister and Birgit Gurtner.

The process of analysis and visualization

All visuals are based on the real results of a text analysis which is realized with different tools.
The evaluation is done in the node-based programming tool VVVV, which can be downloaded free for non- commercial use. The so gained data is visualized with the open-source programming environment Processing. Processing is based on Java, what also enables the implimentation of an online application. It's developed by Ben Fry and Casey Reas for students, artists, designers and developers to create images, animations and interactions. The software can be found at processing.org

The analysed wordcount is in total 2.903.611 (15.625.764 characters).
English translations of the Holy Books, downloaded as digital versions from the internet, were used for textual analysis. The creators cannot grant absolute correctness of analysis for several reasons.
As in Christianity, Islam and Judaism only one book is building the religion's base, Hinduism and Buddhism are referring to several scriptures. In addition to that some of the books, like the Buddhist Pali Canon, are not completely translated yet. We were not able to consider all scriptures, the most spreaded ones were chosen.

Leading characters and their communalities

The large arc visual shows the 41 most frequent characters from different Holy Scriptures and their communalities.
The characters are aligned alphabetically on the x-axis. Their names' and the arcs' size is calculated from their total wordcount in all scriptures. According to that, characters which play a big role in several scriptures are displayed larger.
The colored segments of the arcs are showing the frequency of the word resp. the character in the particular Holy Books.

Below the names can be found bar charts which are breaking down the activities of the characters in detail. The verbs are gained by filtering them out of the texts, technically each verb straight after a character's name is taken. In case of the word order "God loves" the verb "loves" is referred to the charcter's name "God". The hight of the rows and the font size show the frequency of particular activities.

The numerous arcs connecting the names in the upper part of the visual symbolize similarities of the activities assigned to a character pair. An algorithm calculates the according activities of every couple. Based on these results, the different stroke sizes and shades of grey are calculated.

Like all the other visualizations this artwork is based on a text analysis, without a personal interpretation of the creators.

“You” in the Holy Books

Those five graphics are showing the positions and the frequency of the word “you” in the different Holy Scriptures. "You" acts in most cases as a request to abide codes of behaviour or moralities, and so aims most directly at the reader.
Each picture is read from upper left to down right, whereas the most upper left pixel represents the first word of each book, and the most down right pixel the last one. Every colored position (word) means the word “you”.

Typographical artwork of the main characters

The typographical elaboration shows the main characters, which were ascertained due to their entire appearance. Different sizes correspond to the total amounts of appearance in all scriptures, colored letters to the religions according to the leading part of the character.The graphical arrangement has been crafted in this case. The characters' order contains in that case no information but was merely chosen by design principles.

the sheep market

Aaron Koblin
TheSheepMarket.com is a collection of the first 10,000 sheep made by workers on Amazon's Mechanical Turk. Workers were paid 0.02 ($USD) to "draw a sheep facing to the left." Animations of each sheep's creation may be viewed at TheSheepMarket.com.     Links Main website Installation Video (Quicktime) Amazon's Mechanical Turk   created with processing “’If you please--draw me a sheep . . .’ When a mystery is too overpowering, one dare not disobey. Absurd as it might seem to me, a thousand miles from any human habitation and in danger of death, I took out of my pocket a sheet of paper and my fountain-pen. But then I remembered how my studies had been concentrated on geography, history, arithmetic and grammar, and I told the little chap (a little crossly, too) that I did not know how to draw. He answered me: ‘That doesn't matter. Draw me a sheep . . .’” -Le Petit Prince A few words on the project.... Processing drawing tool for recording sheep animations Exhibitions Laboral Centro de Arte, Gijon, Spain Japan Media Arts Festival, Tokyo, Japan Apex Gallery, New York, USA ElectroFringe, New Castle, Australia Media Art Friesland, The Netherlands     work - information - contact

lovebytes

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Name >	Lovebytes 2007	Age >	10 mnths	Location >	Sheffield
Title >	Digital Arts Festival	Quantity >	20,000	Creator >	Matt Pyke / Toxi / Freefarm
Type >	Print	Links >	Lovebytes 2007 Karsten Schmidt Processing	Copyright >	Universal Everything / Toxi
Client >	Lovebytes

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The underlying theme of this year's festival is 'process'.

The concept of 'simple, warm, soft technology' resulted in a population of unique friendly furry faces which would appear across all festival literature.

This generative approach challenges the role of the designer, who designs the 'seed' which spawns these designs automatically within parameters such as hair colour, hair length, head shape, eye shape and name.

Concept and art direction by Matt Pyke, amazing Processing programming by Karsten Schmidt, creating an automated, generative process to create 20,000 unique designs. Each piece you see is one of a kind.

 
Digital Printing of 20,000 unique cards
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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^ Top

or Dalbin, Paris; .................

birds

Birds!

Barbarian Group + Nervo = Awesome!

More often than not, the pipeline for a project gets overshadowed by the end result. The process of getting from point A to B is often overlooked because point B is just sooo damn sexy. But it doesn’t have to be that way. No really, it doesn’t.

A couple months ago, Nando Costa approached Barbarian Group and asked if we would help out with a project his new motion graphics company Nervo was working on for Fox Movies Japan. He showed us the boards and instantly we knew we wanted to collaborate because his vision for this project was quite beautiful and surreal.

What he needed from us was videos of flocking behavior. He had seen the previous experiments I have done with perlin noise flocking and thought it would work well for this project. All he wanted was a couple videos of flocking using a 3D crow (or is it a raven) he would provide. Simple enough. But given the tight deadline, the thought of doing a render and posting it and waiting for approval or changes and then implementing the changes then rerendering and reposting, etc… Well, it just didn’t make sense for this project. So we decided to try something different.

“Let’s deliver them an application.”

Using Processing, we started playing around with the flocking behavior to make it more customizable. The original version of the flocking experiment had very few controls and they had to be hard-coded. There was no run-time adjustment. This was the first thing addressed. Several new parameters were added. They included population density, gravity, drag, collision avoidance, flight range, camera position and tracking, and a few toggles such as tethering strings, floor plane, and bezier curves. Once the parameters were tweaked to the user’s liking, they need only to hit the spacebar and an image sequence of PNGs would start saving to the harddrive.

Processing made the delivery process as easy at it can get. Once completed, all we had to do was hit the ‘Export to Application’ button and Processing would generate Linux, Windows, and Mac applications. We delivered the application to Nervo, gave them some basic instructions, and waited.

The resulting work was fantastic!

The videos are posted at Nervo.tv. Look for the second and third from the bottom to see the spots that included the flocking renders.

sweeney todd

I Was The… title sequence director for Sweeney Todd

Sweeney Todd’s chair, as seen in the film’s title sequence, directed by Richard Morrison

Tim Burton’s film Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, starring Johnny Depp as the all singing, all dancing, throat-slashing protagonist, opens this weekend in the UK. The title sequence, created by production company Th1ng , follows a dripping trail of blood from Sweeney Todd’s chair, down to the basement where the pies are made and beyond…

We caught up with the director of the sequence, Richard Morrison (who has worked with Burton before - he did the title sequence for Burton’s original Batman film back in 1989) and asked him about his role as title sequence director and the importance of having a big producer. Watch the sequence, then watch the interview below (which may take a few minutes to load up as it’s just over 40Mb).

Title sequence credits:

Title: Sweeney Todd
Client: Tim Burton/Dream Works and Warner Bros Pictures
Creative director: Richard Morrison
Art director: Shay Hamias
Director of typography: Dean Wares
Executive producer: Dominic Buttimore
Editor: Dan Lumb
CGI: Graham Christie, Vernon Victory, Jamshed Soori, Matt Redhead
Production manager: Mark Farrington
Compositing: Peque Varela, Peter Ardiner, Corinne Ladeinde
Production company: Th1ng

Process Recess 2

I picked up James Jean’s Process Recess 2 at the travelling man few days ago. It’s 64 pages and full of already-classic illustrations, like “Sex Ed” (featured as a full-sized fold-out) and “Crowdsourcing“, but also personal paintings which you may not have seen before. The first thing worth mentioning: It’s big. Chris Pitzer and James Jean designed the book at 15″ x 11″, so that each page would be big enough to cut out, frame, and hang on your wall (crop marks included) but why would you?! Of course, the book is also about process, so the reverse of each page has a breakdown of the various stages of the creation of the image: thumbnails, sketches, notes on media, tight pencils, acrylics - and then the mysterious leap to the Photoshopped final, probably involving inversions, colour burns and a heaps of James Jean magic.
like the previous book, which is out of print now and fetching over £400 on ebay atm, James Jean's work are trully inspirational, combining classical drawing style with the imagination from the realms of the bizzar.

James Jean, TREMBLED BLOSSOMS

Wednesday, February 6, 2008 PRADA -TREMBLED BLOSSOMS "Last night, Prada premiered a film, "Trembled Blossoms," at the Epicenter store in NYC. It is now viewable at www.prada.com. I wrote the treatment and story for the film, created finished style frames, designed the characters, and roughed out 75 or so storyboards for which the very talented Jared Purrington helped finish and render in watercolor. Below are the style frames and some of the orthographic and production drawings used in the actual film."


Style Frames
Excerpts of Production Artwork and Orthographic Drawings *Orthographic drawing of Leaf Bug based on designs by Jared Purrington.

james jean LCS interview

LCS INTERVIEW :: James Jean :: Illustration

Hi James, thanks for taking the time to do this interview.

Thanks for having me!

To start with I just want to mention that nearly every time I’ve asked one of my interviewees who there favourite living illustrators and artists are your name seems to always pop up regardless of their influences. So my first question is how does it feel to be the Brad Pitt of the illustration world and how did it happen?

I was discovered by Ralph Bakshi when he cast me in Cool World. But before I started adopting children from developing nations and giving them mo-hawks, I painted covers for Fables, published by Vertigo comics. I lived for a year by doing one cover a month while receiving some attention for my work through my website. Then the editorial work started coming in, and a few years later, more book cover and advertising work as well. By then, I had accumulated some awards for my comic cover and illustration work, and my work continued to spread on the internets.

If you had the time and you wanted to how much would it cost me to have you paint my living room?

If I had the time and actually wanted to paint your living room, I’d probably do it for a good meal.

It has been years since you did the Batgirl Covers and I know you don’t like repetition in your work, but would you do them any differently if you revisited them and are you fed up with always being asked about the Batgirl covers?

No, I don’t mind — It’s great that the covers continue to live on, even though it’s been a few years and my run on the series wasn’t that long. Certainly, I would approach the covers differently now . . .they might be more colorful now, the melodrama heightened towards the unusual and ridiculous.

Apart from illustration what other things are you into?

I play the trumpet when I can, but everything I do usually has to do with making pictures.

Who are your favourite artists/illustrators alive today, please note the name James Jean is excluded ;)?

I’m usually looking at old Chinese scroll paintings, Japanese woodblock prints, and anatomical lithographs and mezzotints. But I enjoy the work of Brian Cronin, Tomer Hanuka (with whom I went to school), Chris Ware, the list goes on.

Is your wife inspiring? Mine is! Oh… and does she ever talk about kids and if you had a son or daughter would you let them become an Artist?

My wife has great taste and has amassed an inspiring collection of art books in our home. The vicissitudes of marriage also inform my work as well. If I had kids, I’d only let them pursue art seriously if they had the diligence and talent for it.

Has any of your work ever been animated or have you ever thought about animating your work?

I’ve had the pleasure to work with Motion Theory on a few projects, and they brought my designs to life. Other than that, I’m very happy crafting single images.

Is there any particular Artist or Illustrator you would like to collaborate with or is collaboration not your cup of tea?

The only artist I’ve seriously collaborated with is Kenichi Hoshine, but we each create our own pieces for our site, www.politewinter.com

Can you tell us a bit more about Process Recess?

Keeping my blog has been a small effort of mine to contribute to the illustration community that has supported me all along and also a way to answer the many questions I receive on a daily basis. It’s a document of my life to a certain extant, though I never discuss anything too personal on there. It’s always about the art and its evolution, and hopefully I can offer something relevant and interesting to the culture.

Could you live without your computer?

Sure, but even a paint brush can be considered a piece of advanced technology.

What’s next in the pipeline for James Jean?

My 2nd book will be out this summer, and I have material for a 3rd book soon after. At the moment, I’m concentrating mostly on advertising work while trying to return to my personal painting.

Batman or Batgirl?

Batgirl.

Bows or arrows?

Sometimes I feel like a target.

Fishing or fighting?

Fight to fish another day.