Three Amazing Animations

I stum­bled upon these three great ani­ma­tions. It is amaz­ing what ded­i­cated and cre­ative peo­ple can cre­ate. Enjoy!

Address Is Approx­i­mate
A Google Street View stop motion ani­ma­tion short made as a per­sonal project by direc­tor Tom Jenk­ins.

Mario enters the real world

FRAMES by Mar­tin Thoburn
Frames is a short mixed media ani­ma­tion about a char­ac­ter who is thrust into dif­fer­ent worlds after dis­cov­er­ing the arti­fi­cial­ity of his own world.

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2011-11-27

• Photo: tiki by von­tiki on Flickr. Spooky Mug! http://t.co/NpaJfph7 #
• A clas­sic: Your busi­ness card is CRAP! http://t.co/0qWfrcqz #
• Free High Res­o­lu­tion Tex­ture JPGs http://t.co/ZJST8Qio # Read more »

How They Did It (Spray Paint Art Edition)

This week’s install­ment of How They Did It will focus on artist who cre­ate paint­ings using spray paint and a few other objects, includ­ing news­pa­per, sticks, plates and their hands. It’s a pretty cool exam­ple of how adding lay­ers of under paint­ing fol­lowed by increas­ing detail are the hall­marks of all styles of painting.

I love the swag­ger and show­man­ship of the spray paint artists, not only are the works of art pretty inter­est­ing, but they put on a great show. I remem­ber once see­ing a guy who was set up near a some casino in Las Vegas cre­at­ing sim­i­lar paint­ings. It was pretty sur­real, this young tal­ented artist cre­at­ing a sci­ence fic­tion inspired land­scape paint­ings of Sin City in front of a huge crowd of drunks, who stood around utterly trans­fixed with the art of cre­ation. It’s rare for most artists to be cheered when they fin­ish a paint­ing, let alone by twenty-somethings hold­ing three foot long plas­tic cups con­tain­ing some fright­en­ingly syrupy booze con­coc­tion. Vegas is full of sur­real moments, that was one I was priv­i­leged to wit­ness, as I like to say even if you aren’t inter­ested in the absurd, the absurd is inter­ested in you.

A Mex­i­can street artist cre­ates sci­ence fic­tion worlds in 15 min­utes
I found this on YouTube, it is very sim­i­lar to what I saw in Vegas.

Part 1

Part 2

Sci-fi Land­scape by Bran­don McConnell
A pretty cool video show­ing McConnell cre­at­ing worlds quickly that looks awesome.

I don’t think we’re in Kansas any more.…
Con­jure Spray Art cre­ates a cool ver­sion of the Emer­ald City from The Wiz­ard of Oz.

Joel Bauer, Genius

Life is not about being liked it’s about being effec­tive.
The entire objec­tive is to get people’s atten­tion.” — Joel Bauer

This viral video is a clas­sic! Joel Bauer dis­cusses the best busi­ness card ever made, his nat­u­rally. It is funny in it’s macho absur­dity, yet it totally works. I am sure that Mr. Bauer got way more speak­ing gigs after this video hit the intertubes.

From a design per­spec­tive, Bauer’s point about get­ting noticed is extremely impor­tant to remem­ber. He said that he designed  a card that is so cool that “…even if they don’t like you they won’t throw away your card.” His busi­ness card is way over the top, but it is effec­tive. As design­ers we should take that les­son to heart, if you are try­ing to make a big splash, then some­times it is worth it to go all out! If you can cre­ate a design that is so unique and cool, they won’t for­get it. Just like Bauer, even if you don’t like Bauer or his video you won’t for­get it.

Here is a good inter­view of Joel Bauer. It is pretty reveal­ing, Bauer says that the per­son in the video is really more of a char­ac­ter than what he is like in real life. Which is good, I can’t imag­ine any­one liv­ing with some­one like in first viral video.

Random Design Quote

A ran­dom quote from famous graphic design­ers on design, cul­ture and art.

Good let­ter­forms are designed to give a lively, even tex­ture, but care­less spac­ing of let­ters, lines and words can tear this fab­ric apart.

–Robert Binghurst, The Ele­ments of Typo­graphic Style

Happy Thanksgiving!

To those in the United States I’d like to wish you all a Happy Thanksgiving!

Mars Mission 2025 After Effects Experiment

I thought I’d share an exper­i­ment with that I cre­ated today with After Effects, Pho­to­Shop, Pre­miere Pro and Sound­booth. You could say I used lots of tools in my Adobe tool­box today!

First, I took a photo from iStock­photo and using layer masks and adjust­ment lay­ers I turned it into the sur­face of Mars, or tired to. I then took it as a lay­ered doc­u­ment into After Effects. I was inspired by this great post from Church Media Design and used it as a start­ing point to cre­ate the stars and aurora (big hint: frac­tal noise!) and added some text. I then went to Sound­Booth and I took some canned music and mixed it with a wind sound effect to cre­ate the sound­track. Finally, I brought the audio and video together in Pre­miere and then exported the file.

All in all it was a fun lit­tle exper­i­ment I can’t wait to do another one.

Typography Tuesday: 5 Awesome Web Based ASCII Generators

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Ah, it’s Tues­day and that means it is typog­ra­phy time! This I’d like to share five awe­some web based ASCII art gen­er­a­tors. ASCII Art is one of the finest of the geek arts, plus it’s a fun lit­tle trick to add to your HTML code, a sort of Easter Egg like on a DVD. I have found a lot of soft­ware you can down­load to cre­ate ASCII art, but maybe I’m just para­noid about down­load­ing unknown soft­ware to my sys­tem. With that dis­clo­sure, I pre­fer these web based gen­er­a­tors. Some do text, some do images and some do both.

A major tip for gen­er­at­ing images make sure that your images have lots of con­trast, that will aid these tools quite a bit.

• patorjk.com/software/taag/
  My per­sonal favorite for text, an online web appli­ca­tion that allows you to type in large ASCII Art text in real time.
• degraeve.com/img2txt.php
  My favorite for con­verts images to ASCII.
• glassgiant.com/ascii/
  This one con­verts pic­tures to ASCII text art
• network-science.de/ascii/
  Gen­er­ate a ASCII graphic from a word or text.
• ascii-art-generator.org/
  This one is very good at cre­at­ing images, though they are rather large. I cre­ated the self por­trait below with this tool.

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2011-11-20

• Photo: Exot­ica by tvDAV­Epgh on Flickr. Nicely altered cover of Mar­tin Denny’s Exot­ica album. http://t.co/7bovHJs4 #
• “I can accept fail­ure, but I can’t accept not try­ing.” — Michael Jor­dan #
• Cool Surf Web­site design via @michelemack­lin http://t.co/FBiFisHC #surf­ing #design # Read more »

How They Did It

I thought I’d share some more cool videos that show the behind the scenes process in some great design and art projects. Note these aren’t how to videos, they are more art­ful than hands-on, so sit back and enjoy, because they are still worth the time. They give you a greater appre­ci­a­tion of the skill and craft that goes into cre­at­ing these works, which will help us all a being bet­ter at graphic and motion designers.

Taras Lesko builds a 7FT Gun­dam Mk-2 out of paper.
This is fun, watch­ing Taras Lesko build his model of a 7FT Gun­dam Mk-2 (okay, I have no idea what that is, appar­ently some kind of robot) cre­ated with paper is pretty cool, I am not sure what you uses some­thing like this for, but I sure enjoyed this video. His paper model was made up of 1250 parts on 720 pages of paper, for a total paper weight of 10lb (4.5kg)!

“7FT Gun­dam” — Ulti­mate Paper­craft from Taras Lesko on Vimeo.

Tat­too artist Shawn Dees shows how he cre­ates his art
Shawn Dees does great work in this video. The Samu­rai is pretty sweet.

John C. Thurbin cre­ates a cool illus­tra­tion in time lapse/stop motion.
This is pretty fun, the song is awe­some and so is John C. Thurbin’s work. The illus­tra­tion reminds me of The Illu­mi­na­tus! Tril­ogy by Robert Anton Wil­son and Robert Shea.