The “Vote for Hope” video was created at Ursa Minor Arts and Media in San Rafael, CA with chief animator James Curtis, using designs and direction from M.C. Yogi. It’s is an extremely well crafted video funded and supported by grassroots donations.
With the 2008 presidential election, Americans face a pivotal choice between not just two candidates, but two paradigms. We need someone who understands the complexity of our time. Someone who believes in investing in renewable energy, in education, in women’s rights, in civil rights, in healthcare for Americans. Someone who believes in dealing with global issues with diplomacy so we can restore our respect in the world. Barack Obama represents the change we need and can lead us into a brighter future.
“Vote For Hope” was written to encourage and inspire the hip hop generation—and everyone—to get involved, and contribute their time, energy, creativity, and other resources to be the change they want to see in the world. We have been inspired by the artistic and musical contributions that have been pouring out accross the nation in support of Barack Obama’s campaign. Vote for Hope is our offering to this creative movement. It is our way of adding our small voice to the collective voice of millions of Americans calling for a change.
In a couple of weeks Naomi Klien (author of The Shock Doctrine, and No Logo) is coming to the University of Lethbridge to discuss themes from The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. The book is the gripping story of how America’s “free market” policies have come to dominate the world—through the exploitation of disaster-shocked people and countries.
Around the world in Britain, the United States, Asia and the Middle East, there are people with power who are cashing in on chaos; exploiting bloodshed and catastrophe to brutally remake our world in their image. They are the shock doctors. Thrilling and revelatory, The Shock Doctrine cracks open the secret history of our era. Exposing these global profiteers, Naomi Klein discovered information and connections that shocked even her about how comprehensively the shock doctors’ beliefs now dominate our world—and how this domination has been achieved. Raking in billions out of the tsunami, plundering Russia, exploiting Iraq—this is the chilling tale of how a few are making a killing while more are getting killed.
The following is the Shock Doctrine short film, it neatly summarizes how the Shock Doctrine works.
Good Magazine produced this politically charged, entertaining, and interesting youtube video about the state of the world, our demands for oil, and the dramatic increases to the cost of living in a world thirsty for energy.
If we’re addicted to oil, our twelve-step program should begin with admitting that we have a problem. As the price of oil creeps higher, finding new energy sources is more important than ever. But the search for alternatives, combined with environmental disruptions, is putting new pressures on other essentials like food. There are some things that are going well in the world. Right now, the economy is not one of them.
Do you STILL love the Beatles? Then you will love this interview with John Lennon (that you haven’t heard before).
In 1969, a 14-year-old Beatle fanatic named Jerry Levitan, armed with a reel-to-reel tape deck, snuck into John Lennon’s hotel room in Toronto and convinced John to do an interview about peace. 38 years later, Jerry has produced a film about it. Using the original interview recording as the soundtrack, director Josh Raskin has woven a visual narrative which tenderly romances Lennon’s every word in a cascading flood of multipronged animation. Raskin marries the terrifyingly genius pen work of James Braithwaite with masterful digital illustration by Alex Kurina, resulting in a spell-binding vessel for Lennon’s boundless wit, and timeless message.
Big Brother State is a nice motion graphics video that uses the examples of closed circuit TV and trusted computing to warn about the dangers of a surveillance society.
It is released under a Creative Commons sampling licence by David Scharf and you can download the short film in several formats.
If your finding the download a bit slow, the YouTube mirror is nice and fast.
Just for fun, the motion graphics fans out there might enjoy the stop action magic of Platform from motiongrapher.com.
“Smith & Foulkes used a Canon Digital SLR camera linked up to a laptop allowing them to capture frames and play them back checking the shots as they went along. By shooting digitally Smith & Foulkes ended up with a much larger image size to work with when compared with the normal 35mm motion picture frame. These frames were then taken into After Effects and Photoshop for a clean-up where people and rigs from shots were removed. A final grade was then added in Flame.”
When I took a stroll around the presidio while in San Francisco last January, I stumbled upon the LucasFilm compound—the place where they make so many of the world’s great special effects.
Today I came across a humorous Conan O’brien clip in which Conan visits the studio, checks out some of the movie memorabilia and he even gets suited up in mo-cap gear. His tour was a lot more extensive than mine.
It was interesting to see him interacting in some of the places I had photos, like these ones of Darth Vader and Boba Fett. I also got one outside with a similar background of the San Francisco Palace of Fine Arts.
I’m a typographic artwork fan, a Quintin Tarrentino movie fan and I really like motion graphic compositing projects, so, when I saw Jarratt Moody’s time-based typography assignment (at SCAD) based on Samual L. Jackson’s “Say What Again” dialogue from Pulp Fiction, I figured I couldn’t pass up the chance to share this:
The basic idea of the project is to take a piece of audio from wherever (movie, song, poetry reading, answering machine) and then represent that audio on screen using only typography.
Jarratt chose a famous bit of dialogue from Pulp Fiction as his subject matter. (Okay, what dialogue from Pulp Fiction isn’t famous?) The resulting piece is full of whimsy and style. Jarratt does some great things with scale and simple but effective camera movements. Get those headphones on and prepare yourself for several lashings of Samuel L. Jackson’s naughty tongue.
Back in New York City for post production, the most interesting challenge was to design the type. We ended up designing just one custom-made alphabet for all the cars, but made all sorts of letter-like shapes for everything else. We made fun letters looking like buildings, trees, clouds, leaves and birds. We made letters carved into a cliff, and a flock of sheep forming a sentence. None of it could have been achieved with off-the-shelf fonts.
After watching the video, take a second to go back and pan through the video to see all the creative font placements. Also check out the this second ad in the series.
Rabbit is a creepy remix of old graphics from 1950s illustrations that have been rendered into animation in Adobe After effects. It’s a beautifully creepy story—just in time for Halloween.
For those of you with an interest in compositing / special effects / animation, I think you’ll find the Thank You For Smoking opening main titles created by Shadow Play Studio an interesting distraction. The old time fiddle music is nice too.
A few weeks ago I saw Christopher Buckley, the author of the book by the same name, on TV and after hearing him speak I think I’m not only going to check out the movie, but devour the book too.
