One Bright Dot: ‘One Bright Dot’ is a beautifully animated short film directed by Clément Morin with music by Etienne Forget and sound design by Hugo Thouin. Check it out & enjoy!
Tiffany Bozic: We love these surreal paintings from the portfolio of American artist Tiffany Bozic and have posted a selection of them for you below. It seems Tiffany Bozic has spent the majority of her life living with and observing the intricacies of nature. Her work has the traditional air of tightly rendered illustrations but with a highly emotional range of surreal metaphorical themes. In her paintings and sketches, she presents her vision of life’s struggles and triumphs that are largely autobiographical. Her wide array of subjects are inspired both from her extensive travels to wild places, and the research specimens at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, California. Over the years, Tiffany Bozic has developed a complex process of masking and staining so the natural grain can collaborate with each composition using multiple layers of watered down acrylic paint on maple panels of wood. She has had several solo exhibitions featuring her large-scale paintings and installations. Her work has also been included in numerous group shows across the country and spoken about at international events. She was also the first ‘Artist in Residency’ whereby she collaborated with the California Academy of Sciences, to create the “From the Depths” exhibit on the public floor of the museum in November 2007. Tiffany Bozic is a self-taught artist currently living and working in her cottage in Marin, California. For more of Tiffany Bozic’s amazing work, we recommended a visit to her website. Enjoy!
Visual Effects: We randomly stumbled across this excellent montage created by Jim Casey showcasing the evolution of visual effects from 1878 to 2014. Check it out – hypnotic!
Kitchen Ghosts: ‘Kitchen Ghosts’ is a very beautiful and delicious series of culinary cinemagraphs created by Dasha & Olya – Russian photographer Daria Khoroshavina (Dasha) and prop and food styler Olga Kolesnikova (Olya) – who are based in Moscow. An amazing series of animated GIFs about all things food and cooking, so far ‘Kitchen Ghosts’ includes stunning and delicious animations of them preparing French toast, breakfast, a pear and walnut strudel, and a pasta dish with chicken and honey orange sauce. Dasha & Olya’s mission is to make food photography beautiful, appetising and exciting. ‘Kitchen Ghosts’ will simply mesmerise you and make your mouth water. Enjoy!
VHS: We love this awesome series of fake VHS covers imagined by Golem13 as an April Fools Day joke entitled ‘La VHS n’est pas HS’ (VHS is not dead). The modern movies and television series adapted for VHS include everything from ‘Game of Thrones’ to ‘Gravity’ through to ‘Dexter’, ‘Breaking Bad’ and ‘Interstellar’. Very cool!
Projection Napping: In an original and tongue-in-cheek take on projection mapping, Brooklyn-based digital studio Dawn Of Man has been projecting giant-sized video of slumbering people on buildings around New York City for their ongoing project ‘Projection Napping’. According to the studio, the site-specific installations use the very latest in “projection napping technology” and note “These massive nappers were projected throughout NYC over the course of several weeks, occurring unannounced, and each lasting only for a few hours. An unsuspecting audience usually emerges at each location, often sparked with intrigue, sometimes enlightenment, and always a whole lot of questions.” See, it does pay to grab a snooze wherever you can. Take a look below:
Conrado Salinas: While flicking through our daily feeds, we stumbled across the amazing work of Los Angeles artist Conrado Salinas who is a freelance illustrator with a background in digital art and graphic design. Conrado Salinas has an impressive digital illustration portfolio. He was featured in Versus Magazine’s 2014 Summer Issue and had his ‘Bone Collector’ piece printed and featured at Adobe MAX 2014. Conrado Salinas also has a few more process steps of certain digital pieces that you can see on his website. Below are a selection of illustrations from his Behance portfolio which can also be purchased from his on-line store. LOVE!!
Jean-Paul Frenay: In order to kick off the ‘OFFF Quebec 2015’ festival, the filmmaker Jean-Paul Frenay has written and directed a surreal yet fascinating visual art, transforming the creations of other artists into a truly hypnotic experience. OFFF comments about Jean-Paul Frenay’s piece “They say you should observe a piece of art deeply to understand its concept and interpret it in your own way, we think that Jean-Paul Frenay took this idea and twisted it into something even bigger than just an interpretation. He made sure to create an introspective ‘sarcastic’ adventure. We were so astonished when we received this and proud to present to you a visual piece communicating social behaviours in different sceneries that will put you into a hypnotic experience.” OFFF is “an entity in continuous transformation, alive and evolutionary. More than a decade ago, it was born as a post-digital culture festival; a meeting place to host contemporary creation through an in depth programme of conferences, workshops and performances by the most relevant artists of our time.” Jean-Paul Frenay is a Film Director/Creative Director and multidisciplinary Visual Artist living in Belgium. Born in Siegen, he spent his youth in Germany before moving to Brussels to begin his studies. His particular vision and the quality of his films made him graduate with honours from the InRaCi Film School. After a specialisation in visual effects, he started his career as a flame artist where he developed his skills which gave him the confidence to start directing. He took his first steps directing commercials and quickly became known for his ability to mix many different techniques, including live action, stop motion animation, CGI, miniatures, motion design, video mapping and photographic artworks. Several of his projects such as his short film ‘Artificial Paradise, Inc.’, the collaborative project ‘Resonance’ or his ‘VW Bluemotion’ and ‘Nike’ commercials gave him the opportunity to be featured in numerous leading national and international industry festivals and publications such as Onedotzero, Stash, IDN, OFFF, Motionographer, Shots and Repérages. Always looking for new challenges, he sometimes works as a video artist in performance pieces creating visuals and interactive installations for plays, choreographies and experimental work. In parallel, he’s developing his photographic skills creating artworks and a personal series and as a passionate musician, he is leading the electro rock project I, The Phoenix which already got great reviews for their first stereoscopic album. It seems Jean-Paul Frenay is always trying to push the limits, changing his style and explore beyond boundaries while continuing to combine storytelling with a strong sense of art direction.
Alexia Sinclair: We love the outstanding creations of photographer and artist Alexia Sinclair, including her latest series ‘Rococo’, which depicts a dreamlike world bathed by the influences of the 18th century and the court of Marie Antoinette. Alexia Sinclair notes that “Rococo is a series of theatrical artworks inspired by the lives, fashions, gardens and motifs of 18th century high society. Following the design aesthetic of this period, the series is sensual, playful and flamboyant. During this period, powerful women of the French court became fashion icons and their tastes swept across Europe. Their excessive, luxurious and exotic creations have inspired many aspects of the costuming within this series; from Madame de Pompadour’s porcelain flowers, to Madame du Barry diamond necklace, Marie Antoinette’s muslin chemise and the Duchess of Devonshire’s towering plumes. The floral backdrops within the series pay homage to the dreamlike landscapes of the Rococo period. Known as the pleasure playgrounds, their hidden gardens, mazes and wild flower meadows formed the backdrop of decadent garden parties and mischievous encounters.” Alexia Sinclair is an award winning Australian Artist and Photographer whose distinct style is easily recognisable and highly original. Using a visual narrative, Alexia Sinclair’s art is both dark and seductive, baroque and symbolic yet her multilayered photographs present contemporary notions of fashion and beauty through innovative digital media, whilst restoring antique notions of classicism, elegance and luxury. Sinclair is an artist who skilfully balances the worlds of Fine Art and Commercial Art. Whilst her evocative Fine Art imagery adorns the walls of museums and is held in important art collections, she often translates these skills and signature style into highly polished campaigns in the commercial arena for clients such as Harpers Bazaar and Canon Australia. Completing a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Hons I) and Master of Fine Arts, Alexia Sinclair is the recipient of a travelling arts scholarship, and two postgraduate scholarships. She has worked in New York as a digital artist and exhibited in numerous exhibitions including at the Australian Centre for Photography and the Art Gallery of NSW with her latest series ‘Rococo’ most recently on display at the Black Eye Gallery in Darlinghurst, Sydney Australia. Below is a selection of Alexia Sinclair’s amazing work but for a more detailed look, we suggest a visit to her website.
Walt Disney Logo: Ethan Jones has created an amazing compilation video of Walt Disney Pictures‘ various animated logo openings featured in their films over the past three decades. According to Jones, the 1985 animated film The Black Cauldron was the first to showcase a modified version of the intro logo with animated variations of the logo initiated by Toy Story in 1995. Although in 1989 and 1990, Disney began to use digital ink-and-paint animation via CAPS (Computer Animation Production System), the Walt Disney logo (along with Disney-produced animated programs made for TV) still used traditional cel animation, with two computerised variants introduced in 1995 and 2002. Even after 1995, Disney still used production cels painted by hand throughout the late 1990s and into the mid-2000s. They last used the production cels for the Walt Disney logo in a theatrical trailer for the 2005 movie Chicken Little. The hand-painted cels looked pretty outdated and cheap by this time. In 2006, Walt Disney Pictures started using a new intro with a new CGI animation containing a very complex depiction of the Cinderella Castle and its surroundings. It was a clear change from the old blue and white intro with its stylised castle and 2D animation. The new intro was first used on Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, which premiered in the United States on July 7, 2006. The first Pixar movie to feature this logo was WALL-E. Starting with the release of The Muppets, the words ‘Walt’ and ‘Pictures’ have been removed from the theatrical logo, which was shortened to ‘Disney’. This was used before 2011 as the on-screen logo for Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment starting in 2007. This video concludes a great journey through history with the 2014 film Into the Woods with Disney always seeming to add a little something extra to the Walt Disney logo to fit the film being watched. Walt Disney Pictures, Inc. is a film production company and division of The Walt Disney Studios, owned by The Walt Disney Company. The division is based at the Walt Disney Studios and is the main producer of live-action feature films within the Walt Disney Studios unit. It took on its current name in 1983. Today, in conjunction with the other units of The Walt Disney Studios, Walt Disney Pictures is classified as one of Hollywood’s “Big Six” film studios. Nearly all of Walt Disney Pictures’ releases are distributed theatrically by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, through home media platforms via Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment and through television syndication by Disney–ABC Domestic Television. Check out this fantastic video below – it’s long but well worth watching!
