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Filed under: Motion Graphics •Visual Effects •

motion09 in Review

Tuesday morning, Trish had a plane to catch to go speak at Postapalooza in Michigan, while Chris stayed behind to catch the final two days of motion09. Chris slipped in at the tail end of Mark Coleran’s always-excellent talk on producing data screens and other visual interfaces for films (it’s interesting to see how many elements Mark pre-renders so that he can quickly re-use them in different contexts) before seeing a few more talks, panels, and keynotes:

Experience Design: Unconventional Content Delivery Systems

The term “experience design” relates to location-specific video projections such as art installations, projecting video onto buildings, and other unusual signs such as the Astrovision sign in Times Square or the Fremont Street Experience in Las Vegas (both which we’ve had a chance to work on). Or as Rod Basham of Imaginary Forces described it, “let’s project stuff onto weird surfaces and see if it actually works.” Projects Rod walked us through included:

Bubbles in the Wine for the Guggenheim Museum’s New York, New York exhibition on the last 50 years of New York architecture. Video was projected from inside eight 20’ cones that ended in bubble-like screens of varying sizes, all synchronized to a soundtrack. They built a stencil in Final Cut Pro of how the bubble-screens would be arranged so that the editor could check how the images would sequence and flow. (Follow the link above and select the “play movie” option to see the template and actual show side-by-side.)

New City for the Museum of Modern Art’s Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition on “the concept of a living virtual world that is parallel and simultaneous to ours.” Here, a faceted space was constructed in a corner of a large hall in the museum. It consisted of 12 trapezoidal images that required careful matting to ensure that one projector’s image didn’t spill over onto an adjacent screen. Projector position and throw distance had to be taken into account; in at least one case, a projector would have needed to have been placed in another room to work (oops) - fortunately, a hybrid overhead projector by NEC saved the day.

Lake of Dreams for the Wynn Las Vegas hotel. The projection surfaces consisted of one large rectangular screen (which doubled as a waterfall), a circular screen overhead (which moved up and down), and a large head sculpture that rose and lowered in front of the main screen. Special challenges included matching the physical motion of the circular screen and head, plus matting out the image intended for the head from the image that appeared on the back screen. Also interesting was distorting the faces of the various talent to fit the generic (and not quite human) features on the giant head.

Trailer Design - Putting Butts in Seats

Later Tuesday William Lebeda (pictured here) and Bryan Thombs of PictureMill discussed the art of designing a trailer for a film, which is a lot different than designing its opening title sequence. As opposed to setting up a story, you need to capture the essence of the film and present it in a way that makes an audience want to see it. They placed the subsequent strategies into a few distinct boxes:

Branding - create a “visual signature” of the film for the campaign. The goal is to create a consistent vision - which is sometimes made more challenging by a studio drawing upon pieces intended for different purposes to create the trailer.

Evolution - what to do when a franchise shifts its focus, or you’re trying to resurrect an old brand.

Fixing - occasionally film marketing fails; testing reveals problems in how a film is perceived. It then becomes the job of the trailer to re-cast the film in the desired light.

Lying - “because sometimes, the truth isn’t enough.” A trailer sometimes needs to project a persona that implies the film, but doesn’t contain actual scenes from the film. One example was the “music video” that was created for the trailer of Beverly Hills Chihuahua.

William and Bryan also spent some time discussing the new requirements that 3D filmmaking has presented for trailer graphics. You can no longer use 2D cheats to imply 3D space (such as scaling a logo to make at appear to recede or come toward you); you actually have to move it in 3D space. Same goes for smoke, particles, rays, volumetric light, and the such - actual 3D effects are now required, as a flat image on a 2D plane won’t convey the required depth.

What’s Fresh - Get Your Trend On

right to left: Chris and Trish Meyer hanging out at a keynote with Erik van der Wilden and Michael Waldron of nailgun*.

Michael Waldron and Erik can der Wllden packed a lot into this talk - so much, that we covered it in a separate post we made earlier, including videos of many of the spots they presented. Some of the overall trends they highlighted were film upping the ante of quality (they recently done their first shoot with the RED One), 3D that doesn’t look like 3D, and using interesting transitions to help make pieces special.

After an hour of showing us examples of cool, trendy spots, they admitted that - to a degree - they use trends as a guide of what to stay away from, so that they keep their own work fresh. However, knowing the current trends is still necessary so that you understand what your clients may be asking for.

Promos & Show Packages

The next day, Michael and Erik of nailgun* showed off some of the promos and show packages they created themselves. They often find themselves pitching for a show that has not been shot yet - so need to ask a lot of questions up front (and even then, the direction of show might change during the initial shooting). They invariably show the client a minimum of three storyboards with different approaches, with a minimum of six frames per storyboard to convey mood and direction. Of course, sometimes they client likes more than one board, so they end up synthesizing different ideas together.

Although every job is different (and they went through four jobs in great detail), there were some constant themes. Among them was that they tend to sketch their storyboards rather than create them in the computer; it’s faster, and they don’t get bogged down in the details while trying to get an idea out of their heads. Once a direction has been agreed upon, then they go back and do “real” storyboards with something closer to the actual elements. After they get a sign off on the colors, editing order, and the such, then they create some motion tests to make sure the client likes the style of movement. In all cases, they strongly prefer to start with music - even if it’s not the final music - because they find it really informs their edits and animations. Rather than hand off style frames to someone else to animate, a designer sticks with a project from start to end to make sure the idea the client fell in love with at the start is what they see at the end.

The End of the Marathon…

left to right: Elaine Montoya, Phil Young, Dan Haskett, and Phil Nibbelink. All photos ©2009 Chelsea Nicole. All Rights Reserved.

By the fifth day of motion09, we were hitting the saturation point - but there were still some good sessions, such as three veterans of Disney (Phil Young, Dan Haskett, and Phil Nibbelink, pictured above) talking about the downfall of Disney animation, and what makes/made good animation (“schmaltz sells - Disney knew how to tug heartstrings and make the viewer connect to a character”).

The closing keynote consisted of Synderela Peng of yU+co walking through a trio of title sequences she worked on, including the very elegant Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, the shadow-puppet-inspired Enchanted, and the very edgy Gamer (some of which was shot in New Mexico), for which yU+co also created the immersive environments. This last movie was a great challenge, as the director shot very “fast and loose” with very little greenscreen - eventually requiring a team of 100 to perform rotoscoping and matchmoves. yU+co worked on 500+ shots in all, about 300 of which made it into the film.

Next year the Motion Conference will start on 10/10/10, and the organizers are promising to further rework the format (and further drop the price). Hope to see you in New Mexico then…

The content contained in our books, videos, blogs, and articles for other sites are all copyright Crish Design, except where otherwise attributed.

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