Category Archives: animation

NEW CINEMA Before the Flood

At the end of last year we told you about New Cinema, a collaboration with Eyebeam and The Creators Project that looks a new ways of presenting cinema. Here’s the latest experiment, which saw  us pool our knowledge of programming and CGI skills to turn probably the earliest form of storytelling, cave paintings, into an interactive experience.

The team — Eyebeam’s Nick-Fox Gieg and Ramsey Nasser, Google coders Alex Kauffmann and Boris Smus, plus our own David Mellor and Mike Woods — created this cinema-game mash-up called Before the Flood, which you can explore by walking around in front of a screen, created using the Unity game engine and floor-tracking software developed at Google. Take a look below or read more here.

VALENTINO Making Of

Here’s our Labs team talking about their installations for the Valentino Exhibition at Somerset House.

See pictures/read more

Book tickets (runs until 3 March)

AUDIBLE Digital Cube

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We were approached to create an animation for this digital cube screen in Times Square directly by Audible. They wanted a 15 second animation that would illustrate a book genre using a smart phone’s headphone chords.  For this particular project, as you might guess, the theme was science fiction.

Framestore’s Design team in New York animated and directed the project. We looked for an opportunity to do something special with the merging corner to make it interesting for anybody looking up at that angle. We came up with the idea of creating a whole alien face made up of two halves that would join in the middle for a quick ‘blink’.  It was a bonus to see this piece in the middle of Times Square.

You can see it in action below, from hand-drawn design stage to the final working cube:

Creators Project – Future of Visual Storytelling

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Our NY Digital team spent the weekend geeking ourselves into a frenzy with our good friends at Eyebeam & The Creators Project (Vice Magazine)

Stand by for the exhibition at the end of January in NYC, as it’ll be freaking amazing.

More info here :

The relationship between filmmaking and technological progress is one that’s been deeply intertwined since the beginning of cinema as we know it, so it’s only fitting that our present era of accelerated technological development should lead to some mind-blowing new forms of cinematic expression. The Creators Project teamed up with art and technology center Eyebeam, and world-renown visual effects company Framestore, to bring together hand-picked teams of filmmakers, creative coders, animators, designers, and sound designers to imagine what new tools, techniques, and forms of storytelling might emerge from this creative collision.

The New Cinema hackathon began as conversations and email exchanges between teams, which were assembled by Eyebeam and The Creators Project. The goal was to give teams time to come up with a narrative concept for their projects, as well as an opportunity to think about how they might achieve it, and what kind of tools and resources they might need towards that end. Preparation for the hackathon included a motion capture session with a Michael Jackson impersonator in Framestore’s London office, researching eye scanning and the analysis of irises, and several dives into Framestore’s vast archives of 3D models, animations, and footage.

The five teams that came together this weekend were tasked with only one objective: to imagine and prototype new and unusual forms of visual storytelling. Their approaches were varied both in content and in tone, but the projects were united by their fearless experimentation and enthusiasm for the ideas being explored.

We’ll be unveiling the projects in the coming weeks on the blog, as well as on the New Cinema and Eyebeamwebsites. A public presentation of the completed projects will be exhibited at Eyebeam from January 29th-February 3rd.

VALENTINO: MASTER OF COUTURE installations

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Our labs and design team have created two installations for the Valentino Exhibition at Somerset House. The first was an animation based on Valentino’s  designs that takes you through some of his most iconic work. We projected it onto a five metre rose, developing our own software to make sure it mapped perfectly onto the giant three-dimensional structure.

The second was an atelier table that displays an animated timeline of Valentino’s career. Images are projected from four synched projectors, with the installation designed and animated so visitors can enjoy the experience from all sides of the table. More photos here.

The Valentino exhibition runs between 29 November 2012 and 3 March 2013. Tickets are available from the Somerset House website.

McLAREN ‘TOONED’ episode catch up – update 05/11/12

Update: The special features-packed DVD is now available to pre-order, along with loads of other Tooned goodies. Take a look over one the McLaren shop.

Hey lucky people.

Our department’s epic ‘Tooned’  series for McLaren is up to Episode Seven 10 now, so we thought we’d put them up here. Lots of you asking about DVD releases and other stuff, and whilst we don’t have the answers right now, make sure you stay tooned (sorry) to the blog.

Episode Seven

Episode Six

Episode Five

Episode Four

Episode Three

Episode Two

Episode One

CCI IDENTS – Create & Play

In our latest project for out-of-home global advertisers Clear Channel International we were asked to create idents for their two sub-brands, ‘Create’ and ‘Play’. Create is responsible for CCI’s bespoke, tailor-made outdoor advertising campaigns; ‘from paper to pixels’, and Play is their premium digital media portfolio. Working directly with the client, we designed and directed these in-house using Maya and After Effects.

As Clear Channel International operates in over 30 countries with each division making their own videos, the idents will be used to add consistency to the brand’s films worldwide. They are part of the CCI website launch that includes the ‘Where Brands Meet People’ film that we originally created for one of the company’s internal conferences.

VEEP viral

We’ve worked with Chris Morris lots of times before (Four Lions, On the Hour, Nathan Barley etc), this time our Design department has designed and animated a short YouTube viral for an episode of Armando Iannucci’s Veep directed by Chris.

The Cassetteboy style clip appears in a scene in episode seven of the first series on an iPad. (Warning: contains swearing, mute to avoid moral corruption).

McLAREN Tooned

Jenson button and Lewis Hamilton in Tooned

Jenson Button get's on the wrong side of some McLaren technology

The Tooned logo on Lewis Hamilton's rear wing

We’ve been spending a lot of time on Tooned, our partnership with McLaren, recently. The three-minute episodes star the voices of Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button along with Alexander Armstrong as Professor M, an impatient Q-from-James-Bond style scientist.

We didn’t just create the animation here at Framestore, we did the whole thing. The shorts have all been written, produced and directed in-house, even the mascots you can see wandering around the grand prix were made by our Production Department.

It came all from a chance meeting but it’s grown into a cartoon series that aims to recast the way people view McLaren. As their executive chairman Ron Dennis says “Motor racing can come across as quite cold and scientific, and at McLaren we’ve probably been accused of lacking humour in the past. But a lot of humour exists in F1, so this is about putting smiles on people’s faces.” It’s even ended up on Lewis Hamilton’s (Hungarian Grand Prix-winning) rear wing.

There will be 12 episodes in total (we’re currently at number three), broadcast before each grand prix this season at around 11:45am on Sky Sports F1 in the UK. Just nine more episodes to make before November…easy.

BBC EURO 2012 – Title Sequence

Framestore Design was given a brief to create a highly stylised, graphical film to be the opening sequence to the BBC’s Euro 2012 coverage. It would hark to the creatures that appear on the national team badges – including the three English Lions, The German Eagle, and the lesser-known Giant Two-headed Bird of Russia – coming to life in an embroidered Otherworld, and preparing for battle.

We began by developing an ancient and epic environment, and the fabulous creatures to inhabit it. Then using the graphical forms on the team badges as a starting point brought each beast to life, taking design cues from sources including modern sculpture and Greek Mythology. We aimed for a graphical, illustrative style that would strengthen the link between the creatures and the team emblems they represented, without the need to go photoreal.