Category Archives: directed by us

New Design Reel

Posted on May 2, 2013 | Leave a comment

Here’s the New York and London Design teams’ latest reel – enjoy!

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Posted in character design, design, directed by us

NEW CINEMA Before the Flood

Posted on February 27, 2013 | Leave a comment

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.

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Posted in animation, design, directed by us, exhibition, installation, interactive

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AUDIBLE Digital Cube

Posted on January 21, 2013 | Leave a comment

AUDIBLE_DIGCUBE

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:

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Posted in animation, design, directed by us, installation

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Creators Project – Future of Visual Storytelling

Posted on December 18, 2012 | Leave a comment

New-Cinema-640x360_slide

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.

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Posted in animation, design, directed by us, exhibition, installation, interactive, Uncategorized

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

Posted on October 3, 2012 | Leave a comment

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

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Posted in animation, character design, directed by us, produced by us, Uncategorized

CCI IDENTS – Create & Play

Posted on August 28, 2012 | Leave a comment

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.

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Posted in animation, brand identity, design, digital, directed by us, ident, produced by us, typography

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McLAREN Tooned

Posted on August 2, 2012 | 2 Comments

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.

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Posted in animation, brand identity, character design, commercial, digital, directed by us, produced by us, tv

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Nestlé Resource – The Fountain of Electrolytenment

Posted on May 3, 2012 | Leave a comment

We were tasked with designing, building and executing a real-time Fountain in the famous Los Angeles “Grove” shopping centre in LA.

Our client, McCann Erickson New York, wanted us to devise and create an interactive waterfall, that answered the public’s questions, in real-time, in individual water droplets!

We crewed up a plethora of amazing talent, from the Graphical Waterfall inventor, Stephen Pevnick, through to the awesome Hollywood set builders Jet Sets. We even used the legendary Danny Rogers, the art director who created Back to the Future!

And for four days, in LA, this stone and (real!) moss beauty chatted happily to the passing shoppers!

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Posted in directed by us, exhibition, installation, interactive, produced by us, Uncategorized

Tanlines music promo – All of Me

Posted on March 23, 2012 | Leave a comment

Framestore’s design and digital department has tapped into its network of UK film and TV talent to produce (and post-produce, naturally) the video for Brooklyn duo Tanlines’ single ‘All of Me’.

The video, a low-fi eighties-style TV performance, sees the band’s music inspiring some old bones in Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club. It was directed by the Mighty Boosh’s Julian Barratt and he was joined by Erik Wilson (Submarine, Tyrannosaur) as director of photography.

Derrin Schlesinger (Four Lions, Noel Fielding’s Luxury Comedy) was one of the executive producers, working alongside our very own Simon Whalley, and we also had the pleasure of working with Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire editor, Chris Dickens. In addition to producing the promo, our multi-talented team also crafted all VFX including the film’s key eighties vibe.

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Posted in digital, directed by us, music promo

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VOX – Internet Week Europe

Posted on November 29, 2011 | Leave a comment

“Juke box meets karaoke meets music visualizer machine”
Check out our latest 3D digital art installation, VOX. Conceptualised, designed and built by our team, VOX was hosted throughout the Internet Week Europe conference (7th- 11th November) at The Hospital Club, London. An experiment in real-time, user-generated, stereoscopic 3D CG content, VOX marries stereoscopic 3D with the cutting-edge gaming technology of Kinect and is believed to mark the first time anyone has successfully united the two technologies.

The installation encourages participants to trigger animation of CG words by moving in front of the Kinect camera. Choose from an eclectic selection of music tracks, ranging from Tinie Tempah to Dexy’s Midnight Runners, then interact with the words to the song by moving your limbs accordingly to fire out the lyrics ‘karaoke style’ in stereoscopic 3D.

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Posted in animation, design, digital, directed by us, exhibition, installation, interactive, produced by us, typography

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