Samsung Central Station

Loving this brand new video to promote Samsung's new Central Station range of USB hub monitors. It's a stop motion film featuring the perils of messy cables.

The monitors themselves include a wireless USB 2.0 dongle that you connect to your laptop. The monitor then ‘comes alive’ when your computer is within 3 feet of the ‘Central Station’. In addition you can plug all your desktop peripherals into it to be ready to go when you need them.

Credits
Client: Samsung Electronics
Director / Animator: Jey Mal
Production: The Viral Factory

‘Animated’ - Irish Animation at Kildare Village for St Patrick’s Weekend

Kildare Village in association with Cartoon Saloon is creating a free family cinema experience to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day. Guests will walk the green carpet into a cosy family screening area with rugs, cushions and complimentary popcorn before enjoying a feast of short animated films including the award winning animation, The Secret of Kells. To coincide with the screenings, Kildare Village will be hosting workshops for 9 to 12 year olds. During “An Introduction to Animation”, children will create their own animation character and storyboard and bring it to life in a cartoon flick-book. The ‘group’ animation will be available for viewing on YouTube following the workshop.

The Secret of Kells is Cartoon Saloon’s first feature film and was directed by Tomm Moore. Nominated for an Academy Award ® for “Best Animated Feature”, the film has screened and won awards in major festivals worldwide. This vibrant animation is a spirited retelling of the provenance of Ireland’s most cherished artefact, the Book of Kells. With the Viking hordes approaching, the monks of Kells are forced to turn their attention from transcribing manuscripts to building barricades. The future of the precious book is in jeopardy and it falls to Brendan, young nephew of the abbot Cellach, to save the day.

Festivities in Kildare Village begin on St. Patrick’s Day itself, Thursday 17th March with a host of short animated films from Cartoon saloon shown hourly between 11am and 4pm. The Secret of Kells, a bewitching animated fairytale, will have a green carpet screening daily at 2.30pm while workshops will take place from 11am until 1pm daily from Friday 18th until Sunday 20th March. Celebrations will continue all weekend with workshops and activities for the whole family to enjoy.

The World Is Full Of Interesting Things...

I spotted this over on Neil Perkin's blog Only Dead Fish. It got a lot of Twitter love last Friday but just in case you missed it, and because I think it's pretty special, here it is for you.

This is the updated 119 slide version of the Google Creative Labs presentation all about recent creative ideas and web campaigns covering everything from advertising to art, and politics to literature. This was put together by Tom Uglow and while it is viewable right here, just as Neil suggested, you should have a look at it on Google Docs for the full effect. This is simply brilliant.

87 Cool Things

I found the following presentation over on If Only We'd Thought of That and I had to share it. It's a collection of cool things, put together by Google Creative Lab, that are just extremely inspiring and creative. Basically it's fairly comprehensive list of the most recent mashups, location-based games, video annotation, augmented reality, digital light displays, photomosaics and collaborative projects.

If the below SlideShare is too small to view, check out the full presentation on Google Docs.

CG 3D Animation

I was doing a bit of digging, looking for someone to do a bit of 3D work for a small project that I was asked to lend a hand on, and I found these guys, C4Real. This is their showcase work and it has to be seen to be believed.



Basically this was just done as an example of C4Real's CG capabilities. The process involved storyboarding, previzzing, animation and rendering, which were all done in house. Total production took 4 weeks and rendering was done on an 8 core MacPro taking 4 months. As you can see the quality is absolutely impecable but it's no wonder, every single frame was rendered at a maximum of 1 frame per hour, with some frames taking up to 24 hours each.

Galactic Mail: FedEx vs. UPS

I spotted this over on [Geeks Are Sexy] and it blew my mind. It's a 3D short animation produced by French Animator Douglas Lassance (AsteroKid) in collaboration with Jonathan Vuillemin (Motraboy).

The piece took four months to get from storyboards to compositing, but there it took a slightly different route to the norm. The guys decided that Galactic Mail wouldn't be about generating impressive 3D renders using, what Jonathan calls, the Sigg Jones approach with proper global illumination shaded film,they concentrated on the pictures themselves and their composition, colours and overall coherence of the style.

Jonathan said, "I had this idea of making a movie with self-illuminated textures where all the shadows would be painted in already, and then combined with a “sliced” shadow system where you could really isolate how stuff are going to look when it’s in the shadow or not, nothing physically correct, but pretty controllable".

So check this out...

Evolution of the logo

I posted before about logos both here on Digitology and over on Cybercom, but both these posts have nothing on this video. Awesome stuff (sorry I'm a graphic novel geek).

Wallpaper Graduate Directory

It's the Wallpaper Who's Who of 2009 - the people that will change the face of their industry.

Animusic

A friend send me this link this morning to check out, and I have to say, I was fairly impressed. Loving the idea of something like this being possible in real life, but for now, I'm happy to see the CGI version. There's a couple of downloads available at their website - check it out.

Life is a Beach

I StumbledUpon this great animated French short movie. It's very much worth a quick stop to check out - the animation is fantastic and it's accompanied by a really nice soundtrack. There are still more sections waiting to come online, such as the making of, and I can't wait. Really, really nice work.