This film was made for Rex McWhirter, a brilliant creative and good friend of MB who recently moved on to explore the freelance world.
We always try and send people off with a little movie just to thank them for all their hard work and Rex was no exception. As someone who’d made a real impact on the studio (and who will continue to do so in the big bad world outside) we came up with an idea that told the very simple story of Rex’s inevitable cosmic trajectory.
We shot it all on a 5D over one evening a couple of weeks ago. Shoreditch inevitably becomes a bit of a ghost town at 4am on a Tuesday morning and it was fun trying to capture that. Guy then created Rex’s ’spaceship’ and extra ambient lighting in after effects – culminating in Rex’s ‘reveal’ at the end.
We wish Rex all the best in his new quest for adventure!
These days when the world is moving so fast, sometimes it is good to look at great things that were created earlier. It’s nice to get inspiration from things that were born in the time when the world moved much slower. Not having a computer or other advanced technology did not stop people from creating things that can still inspire us.
For those who haven’t seen this, have a look at the short animated film Tango made in 1979 by Zbigniew Rybczyńskiego .
Last week Moving Brands were featured in a Design Week article on animated logos. According to DW, “Clients increasingly have to consider the impact of their brand properties across a range of media platforms, so it makes economic sense to invest in animation at the early stages of any identity project” – a belief Moving Brands was founded upon! For those of you who can’t access DW Online, here’s our 5 inches of fame from the piece.
“A multi-platform, moving world is the starting point for all of Moving Brands’ projects. ’If you design a brand and haven’t thought about how it works on-screen, you haven’t done your job,’ says Moving Brands founder James Bull. ’I tell students that the letterhead, the logo and the business card should be the last things they think about. Companies use Power Point and e-mail, and send movies to each other – that’s where brands need to work.’
Moving Brands designs creative explorations and executions that include animation, sound and interactive elements for all their clients, whether they’re telecoms companies such as Swisscom or more traditional clients, such as Savile Row tailor Norton & Sons. ’Once you’ve got those elements, you can repurpose them for print,’ explains Bull. ’If you do it that way round it’s easy – and clients don’t then have to spend £30 000 on the last three seconds of an ad, because the branding consultancy has already worked that out.’ Not all branding consultancies have this unfailing and all-encompassing approach to animating brands.”
Click here to watch our latest case study showreel.
*Film contains scenes of a graphic nature and possibly NSFW*
Yesterday M.I.A released the video to her new track “Born Free”. The video, directed by Romain Gavras, adds M.I.A to the list of musicians turning their backs on the traditional 3 minute MTV-style music video. Lady Gaga’s Telephone weighs in at 9min32sec and is a typically Gaga-esque riot of colour, kitch, sex and product placement. To date it has had almost 3 billion hits on YouTube. Stylo from Gorillaz features Bruce Willis, runs to 5min11 and combines animation with live-action. “Born Free”, at 9min06sec carries a strong political message and scenes of a very graphic nature. B(r)ands today are dealing with an over-stimulated audience and creating engaging, surprising and even shocking ways to grab and hold their attention is a key challenge. What links all of the above artists all is a marked understanding of a more demanding audience – an audience used to free music streaming, fatigued by hot things crawling around on an over-lit soundstage, and looking to be entertained above and beyond the current “norm”.
Animation, ‘Logorama’ won Best Animated Short at the 82nd Academy Awards last night. The short uses famous logos to create a hyper-branded vision of L.A. Based on a traditional ‘cop and robber’ storyline, the short makes a comment on the increased use of product placement in film.
Fantastic stop motion animation from Andy Martin – artist and sometime brother of MB’s Paul Martin. Andy created a music video for 1970’s punk band The Johnny 7 Combo and their song “I Wipe My Nose On You” using just a tub of black paint, a tub of white paint, photocopied images of the band, lots of newspaper pages and a flattened cardboard box. For more info on the project click here. As MB’s James Bull commented, “stop motion is the holy grail of animation and Andy has nailed it!”.
Pedro Marín and Great Works present: The first music video in history for Teletext on Cuatro (Channel 4), Spanish national TV, on page 899 during the whole month of May.
To promote Pedro Marín’s new single “El día después” Great Works developed the Teletext concept to reconnect the artist with his origins. Apart from Teletext the video will also be available on “classic TV” and of course online.
Lovely animation about the pleasures and pains of long distance running by James Jarvis.
“I had become interested in the idea of characters that were less referential and more iconic and abstract. I particularly wanted to do something with a potato-headed stick-man that I had been drawing at that time.
The film was inspired by certain personal experiences in running – a favourite run over Blanchland moor in Northumberland, being attacked by a crow in Singapore – and also by the transcendent, almost psychedelic experience of the simple act of running.
Rather than a marketing project inititated by Nike, the film was something proposed and produced by myself, and as such I hope represents a much more equal collaboration with a brand.” James Jarvis
Animation by James Jarvis. Directed by Richard Kenworthy, and music courtesy of Caribou (Crayon was a great choice).
Some of the best, funnest and well executed animation you will see on the web. Swatpaz is from Glasgow and his animations are genius. All writing, drawing, animation, editing, sound and anything else needed to make these bundles of fun are all done by his own skillful hands. Great stuff. Visit his website here.
