tween

Enspire is Hiring
This may be a little off topic, but I thought I’d let everyone know that the company I work for, Enspire Learning, is looking for Flash designers in the Austin area. Enspire’s a fast-paced, high-energy workplace that demands the best design, animation, concepting and leadership skills you have to offer. I’ve learned an absolute buttload of useful skills (both technical and personal) in the last nine months.

We work almost entirely in Flash, so that’s an obvious prerequisite. (As I’ve said many times before, I believe Flash is actually at the forefront of new ideas in motion graphics. Enspire is the kind of forward-thinking company that will prove my prophecies true.) For more details, check out this job posting. I also encourage you to contact me directly. I’ll answer any questions you have.

Smith & Foulkes: Grand Classics
Some of you may have caught the Nokia "Grand Classics" spot when it was on Stash 11 a few months ago, but now we can all enjoy it online (provided you have a little patience with the download).

Directing duo Smith & Foulkes (repped by Nexus in London) also brought us the memorable Honda "Grrr" ad a while back and are turning out to be quite a hot item. They have a knack for creating surreal, witty rides through visual concepts that must have been inspired by strong hallucinogens and/or a childhood head injury. They also love rabbits.

The thing that impresses me most about "Grand Classics," though, are the seamless transitions from one homage to another. Why is it that I like seamless transitions so much? Is it because they mimic the fluid logic of dreaming? Or is it because they require both technical and creative mastery to pull them off? Or maybe it’s because seamless transitions present an alternative world, a world that we want to live in, a world where things fit perfectly together and make sense, where one beautiful thing flows into another without the slightest interruption—a utopia of causality!

Nah. I’m pretty sure that’s not it.

All right, in keeping with my committment to meter out this week’s news, I’m signing off for tonight, even though I’m finding it incredibly difficult to do so. More tomorrow. (Or Friday.) Sorry for all the silliness. I’ve had too much beer.

(Big ups to Shaun Collings for the tip on this spot and for his continued support of Tween.)

I’m sure most of you have probably seen the work of this artist before, but I just stumbled across her site the other day and felt like posting it. So, in an attempt to invest a little more time and “passion” into my writing, I give to you a (most likely grammatically incorrect) paragraph of words! One of the first words that came to me after seeing some of Floria’s work, is EMOTION. A quality that’s usually hard to find in a particular style like this, one that she seems to express naturally. It’s very captivating in that respect, taking you out of mind into a dream like state, where it’s vividly dark, surreal, disorienting, and extremely time-remapped. Here’s the link….see for yourself!

There has been an explosion of new work this week, and it would be silly for me to put it all in one post. At the risk of being beaten to the punch by other more trigger-happy news sources, I’m going to meter out this stuff over the next few days. Let us savor it together like a fine wine swirling lazily by our palates. Or something.

imago: DemoGraphix
Turkish studio imago has created an interesting abstract piece entitled "DemoGraphix." The piece was created almost entirely with expressions in AfterEffects. According to their write-up, the only element not created with scripting was the fractal zooming bit, which was created with a freeware plugin app called XaoS.

When I see stuff like this, I experience an odd mixture of enthusiasm and depression. Enthusiasm because I think it’s really cool to use scripting to create visuals; depression because I have no idea how to do it properly. I have learned a fair number of tricks with Flash, but I’m terrible at integrating mathematically based visuals into a cohesive whole. Big props to imago for creating a sustained visual experience that is pleasing and, at times, surprising.

palazzo.tv
Awww hell yeah! Our very own Christopher Palazzo has finally updated his mothergrabin’ site with some fine-ass work. I’m glad he put boards up there, too. As a relative outsider to the broadcast design process, I love seeing boards. They give me a glimpse into the minds of the folks behind the work.

I plan on picking Chris’ brain about some of his work soon. For now, just dig around in there and have fun.

Much in the style of our almighty tween overlord Justin, I’d like to know what you think. As December is about to rear its head, its probably about time to start getting prepared for an end of year round-up. I’d like to know what you think about the individual pieces & reels you’ve seen this year: What has inspired you? What was the best 2-d animation? What was the best VFX/showreel/TVC/title sequence/etc/etc/etc?

Feel free to mail me or leave your thoughts in the comments below.

Last week I received a DVD from Open (reel here), a multi-talented design studio in New York. There’s a lot I have to say about these guys, mainly because I think they’re easy to miss if you’re not looking at them in the right light. They don’t sport paint drips or 3D arrows or dada collages, and they aren’t catering to MTV clichés (even when they’re working for MTV).

Open strives to be what I would call a "total" design studio: they are as interested in communicating messages clearly and effectively as they are in creating visually interesting work. The dichotomy of form and function, in fact, doesn’t really make sense when thinking about Open’s work; they’re inextricably linked to each other. Open reminds me very much of Paul Rand, who was a master of blending form and function so artfully that to talk about one without thinking of the other was to decapitate the design.

At the moment, the contents of the DVD I received and the content on Open’s site differ a bit. They’ll be updating their site this week to bring it more in line with the DVD they sent me. So as it stands now, I’ve seen a little more of Open’s work than you can currently see on the web. I’ll make a post when they update their site.

Open’s design aesthetic is modernism at its best: bold and clean, with focused palettes that don’t hold back and sans serif typography that showcases the clever concepts and copy driving much of Open’s work. And, interestingly, Open often employ grids in their designs—something you don’t frequently see in broadcast design.

This approach is particularly effective in their text-heavy Trio spots, which expertly guide the viewer’s eye from point to point in a well-choreographed dance of color and form. The grid-based design quickly anchors the viewer’s interest in key locations, and in this way functions like a well-designed website, where zones of dynamic content serve as foundational elements. Indeed, the technique of highlighting key words in the Trio promos echoes the stylistic convention of highlighted hyperlinks on a web page (as on as the actual Trio site, which Open also designed).

One particularly impressive project is the series of videos they’ve created for the 21-foot-long video wall at the Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame. The six pieces on the DVD (there are 26 total so far) call to mind the legendary album artwork of Reid Miles, using form, typography and minimal palettes to create lyrical odes that reflect the music of the jazz masters they commemorate. I’d love to take a field trip to the Jazz Hall of Fame just to see these pieces in person.

I could go on and on about Open’s work. That’s the best part about it—it rewards further study. I encourage you to check out their entire site, not just their motion work. I’ve added them to the Cream O’ the Crop for easy reference.

EDIT: I made a few minor corrections to the text above after receiving a helpful email from Open founder Scott Stowell.

I really dig nextseason’s new reel. Granted, there are a lot of familiar elements in there, but the whole package feels pretty fresh (thanks in part to the interesting choice of music).

I like all the nature references, too. Some of these are overt (fish taking bait, crocs eating fish), but some are more subdued, as in the animated, organic, stain-like imagery of the opening and closing sequences. (Note the little skull over Evan’s name. Nice!) While there is a huge range of styles represented in the reel, there’s a subtle organic current running through everthing. Nice work, Evan.

First Honda uses an M.I.A. track in a commercial (Shynola) to appeal to the youngn’s and now they follow in Diesel’s footsteps by asking artists to interpret inspiration. You may remember Diesel’s “Dreams” the one Lobo created still wakes me up at night. This inspiration version by Honda looks more or less like a showcase of some recent broadcast work. A little less experimental than Diesel’s version, and a little more product placement. One piece however stands out from the bunch, that of J.J. and Maithy. Work like this makes me want to catch up on reading that 3D manual I started six months ago.

Link to “Inspiration”
P.S. you can download the movies and wallpapers by following the downloads link.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the past few months, and now I want to hear from you: What is Tween to you? Or, put another way: What does the ideal post on Tween look like?

If you can pass me a link to a specific Tween post that you think is great, please do. And, just as important, if you can pass me a link to a Tween post that you think is horrible, please do. (If you click the headline of any story, you get a direct link to that story. You can use the search tool to find stories.)

How would you like to see Tween improve? Or do you like it just the way it is now?

Please email me your comments at tween@justincone.com. Thanks in advance.

Sweden’s premier design agency for motion graphics and 3D animation. Great 3d work!

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