Once again, some inspirational and somehow edgy imagery by Prologue, this time for MTV Video Music Awards titles.

Playgrounds is a two-day festival in Tilburg, the Netherlands, where you can see the best digital audiovisual art in the world, such as music videos, animations, commercials, character design, VFX and games AND you can find out how it’s been made during artist lectures and Q&A’s.

Credits:

Direction & Post-Production - Onesize (onesize.com)
Photography - Jasper Faber (jasperfaber.com/photography.html)
Playgroundfestival: (playgroundsfestival.nl/)

It’s always interesting to be able to sneak a peak at ”how they did it”, specially when it’s something you’re deep down into! I’m fully addicted HBO’s show True Blood. Vampires, sex and drama - what can we want more?

I was more then happy to get to see behind the scene video of the opening title which I find so awesome and inspiring. They used anything form consumer DV Cam to Super 8! Even some stop motion is hiding here and there. This clearly is an interesting approach and it’s great to see that their is still some people out there getting to play the left field form time to time!

Also check the viral campaign for it, once again by Digital Kitchen - damn funny by the way:

I happen to accidentally become a commercial photographer, got my first contract right after my first solo show. I love my life and love my work, but sometime, it’s good to have some external eye looking at what we do.

This documentary sounds arch but also like a to-be-seen.

Heard of it from Simon.

What a mind blowing project!

Visiting Woolf + Lapin’s blog I discovered this neat short film, basically a public performance by Emmanuel Bellegarde. Made in only 24 hours with a whole lot of scotch tape, it’s a pretty interesting visual experience and a great public experience. En Français seulement!

I worked in a record for a little while few years back and my manager was a die-hard fan of Coldplay. I could hardly handle them, don’t know why! I think they were too easy listening for me back then.

Anyhow, they totally got me with one of their latest music video for the song Strawberry Swing. The song is great, sort of remembering me of a dial down Animal Collective psycho-pop sound and the animation, made by Shynola, a London based art collective, is awesomely story boarded and realized.

They are also behind a lot of great music video, including Beck’s E-Pro and Radiohead’s Pyramid Song.

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Embedding Disabled by Request?

Universal and EMI disabled the embedding of these two videos and most of their other artists as well for an unknown reason. Sometime I’m wondering what’s wrong with the music industry? Well, a whole lot of things if someone ask me. I looked around, found a lot of rant about that but didn’t find one plausible explanation.

Here’s Chris Buck newest promo piece, a booklet of portraits of look a like. What a great idea and it’s well done once again but that Toronto ex-pat.

Thanks WTJ for that… he definitively have access I haven’t

You can read a pretty interesting interview ( on the CBC website ) with the master when he was traveling around to portrait other folks named Chris Buck for a personal project .

And here’s another piece of anthology when Chris Buck pictured Nick Cave in 1988 - remember film anyone? And enjoy is totally ghetto gear at the time!

K-os, one of Toronto best regarded hip hop artist, just released a music video he co-directed with the brilliant Canadian animator Drew Lifghtfoot.

It’s probably one of the best pixilation ( stopmotion technique where live actors are used as a frame-by-frame subject ) video out there. 4-2-3-1-Action!

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A few other interesting music video making good use of pixilation:

I’m sort of a geak since I have sort of an engineering background and I love The Wired magazine. The latest issue is pretty interesting, featuring stories about an enormous antenna/micro-wave out in Alaska who can trigger aurora borealis ( no kidding! ), a great and so-interesting interview with Dilbert’s creator and their main feature about how to behave in out new social media and internet addicted world is illustrated by non-other then uber-talented photographer Dan Winter.

Featuring Brad Pitt as a dude - yep, like those one out there with a stick-to-their-ear-headset and a full fridge of Bud Light - hilarious then brilliant. A great series by its humour and consistency proving one more time that great photography pay. I’m getting a membership as soon as I’m moved in my new place.

Psst! WTJ also have behind the scene picts of the shoot here. ( Thanks Simon for the info! )

We won the BDA|Promax award with our work for Artv’s channel id from 2008.

According to Wikipedia, Promax Awards are recognized around the globe as the highest accolade for promotion and marketing professionals working in today’s electronic media. Wow!

Bravo to Toxa, all of our little creative crew ( GPG, Simon Duhamel, Maxime Dumont, Erika Reyburn and I ) but most of all, to Artv who’s hell of a creative client! Interesting to see that creativity pay as these low budget spots made their way up among the big guys ( ABC, Astral… ). Touché!

A friend told me about that ad that I can’t get enough of! I’ll try to find a making of somewhere.

Definitively a eye/hear catcher and a classic of mine. Made by New York Droga5 and music by the great Magnetic Fields.

Won’t make me get the shoes though as I just got some new completely recycled El Natura Lista shoe.

I received an email late afternoon yesterday from The Québec’s Magazine Awards - I’ve been nominated into the portrait category for my story on ice fishing in Saguenay. Great news! Last year, I was nominated for the canadian awards for my Cirque Du Soleil story for ROB magazine. Always nice to hear that your work been choosen between many other great one. Not sure this prize will really bring me anything directly, but as we said in Québec: ça fait un petit velour!

While being busy on few stop motion projects at this time, my good friend and kick ass photographer Daniel Shipp ( you don’t know Shipp? well, see his work here ) found for me that awesome stop motion ad for the new Ford Fiesta. Can’t get enough of small cars, stop motion and great ads.

It’s fine - no need to hide. Other phones could be pretty cool too. What about a Nokia?

By Farfar and Hobbyfilm ( Stockholm ).

Great stop motion ad by Wieden & Kennedy ( London, UK )

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Talking of stop motion all over the place, my friend and Montreal’s ultra talentueux motion designer Gabriel Poirier Galarneau done this cool travel diary from his 30 days in Europe:

[ GPG : VOYAGE 08 ] from Gabriel Poirier-Galarneau on Vimeo.

I had a brief meeting with a big photographer studio’s rep last week and I was telling her that I think that I thought that web was were the future of photography was. I was explaining that last year, video ( stop motion for web and tv ) was about a quarter of my yearly contract and that I could see myself doing more and more of that in the future. They’re only doing photography and maybe someone who does both is sort of suspicious in the studio’s eyes. I told the rep that I was a believer (funny!) and that I would not be surprised to find them in 4-5 years doing video and web projects as one of their main things.

Here a few reasons why I think that video and web are part as our future as commercial photographers as print advertising is decreasing since:

1. * The publishing industry is going through some troubled years as news papers are downsizing and magazines closing. They’re losing part of their income from advertising for online advertising. Their salvation is in the web and most of the majors print players already have extended websites.
2. * The Financial Times report that online advertising is expected to see the sector overtake US newspaper advertising in terms of size by 2011.
3. * We all spend hours surfing the web. That’s also where advertisers are trying to get to us. In 2008, GM split its 3 billion dollar print advertising budget to relocate half it to online advertising.
4. * As our internet connection and bandwidth are slowly getting better, it will allow advertisers to show more and more video content.
5. * Last year, over 13.5 billion videos where watched online, a 45% increase over 2007.
   
6. * eMarketer projects that online video ad spending will increase by nearly 50% in 2009 and reach over $4.5b in 2013. At the same time, consumers will spend more time with web video due to the improved production quality and as an alternative to more expensive leisure activities.
7. * I was at a conference of a creative director from Toronto’s Organic, a well regarded interactive ad agency, as the speaking was explaining how now they are often directing video and photoshoot simultaneously. They partially stopped hiring video production companies to do some of the work in-house.
8. * Vincent Laforet is preaching and he’s getting a lot of photographers exited too. His sponsored director debuts have been viewed over 1.5 million times in the first 10 days it was online.
9. * Even the gear is going wacky: a Canon 5D Mark II thinks it’s a RED Camera and a RED thinks it can do stills like that sexy Canon.

Coming from/still working in Montreal where a lot if not most photographers ( see Simon Duhamel, John Londono, Shoot Studio… ) sometimes/often go on the video side maybe it doesn’t sound as weird to my ears than some always based in Toronto shooters? Anyway, that trend is growing fast and steady if you ask me. It’s somehow the next big step.

Suggested reading:
Vincen Laforet - The Cloud Is Falling on Sport Shooter
Thomas Mrazek - The Future Of Print Media Is In The Net on euro|topics

Toronto photographer Finn O’Hara is looking for people with weird names like Michael Jackson, Saddam Husseim, Bud Light to have their portrait done for his project I love your fucking name. I think this is an awesome idea - too bad my name isn’t weird enough to get my portrait done. Maybe I should make one up!

I have been wanted to feature that video for a while now. London based director Johnny Kelly made that pretty cool animation using both stop motion photography and motion design for Goodby, Silverstein & Partners.

The Seed from mike geiger on Vimeo.
And here’s the making of:

Making of ‘The Seed’ from Johnny Kelly on Vimeo.

The idea was simple:making a tv spot without using electrical powered lighting. So, they end-up using 280,000 candles. Why not! the result is delightful.

I’m a big fan of Chris Buck’s work and I don’t miss an occasion, specially when teaching, to introduce my students/friends/strangers to his great and original portrait photography. He’s the kind of photographer that never miss an occasion to surprise us, often in a quirky way. He’s also born in Toronto, where he still work sometimes but realized soon enough that he needed to be in New York if he wanted to pursue is funky vision. Fact is that pretty much no Canadian magazine would run such quirky pictures - well, ROB and The Walrus do it from time to time, but that’s about it.

I was quite happy to find that A Photo Editor blog featured a long interview with him last week. Haven’t had the chance to read it both as I want to do so when I’ll be enjoying some free time between Christmas and New Year eve but I thought I’ll post the link to it here: Chris Buck interview part 1 and part 2.

The CBC also did an really interesting interview with him back in 2006: Buck Shot.

This Is Where We Live from 4th Estate on Vimeo.

Wow! This fantastic piece of work been animated with a lot of cardboard, many animators and over the course of 3 weeks. I found it my Ventilate.ca daily visit - thanks for that by the way.

You’ll find some production pictures here.

It makes me wonder why most of the time I find brilliant animated, artsy and avant garde work it often comes from the UK or places like Bresil and Argentina - I’m thinking here of that insane post-it animation for Nike 10k race.

It seems to me that we are somehow less brave with our advertising than many other culture. Or maybe are we too close to our southern neigbourgs’s culture. Lot of the best stuff coming out Toronto is destined to international markets like the UK - I’m thinking here of that cool character stop motion made for Playstation 2 by Head Gear Animation’s Drew Lightfoot: Playstation 2 Ad