Bianca Ansems has created a really fantastic piece with this underwater adventure using semitranslucent fabric, cutouts and a multiplane:

The London International Animation Festival wanted a trailer to celebrate their upcoming animation festival and their new home, the Barbican. LIAF is the UK’s largest animation festival, showcasing more than 250 films annually and screening over ten days and nights at Central London Cinemas from the 26th of August to the 4th of September.

Both Daniela Negrin Ochoa and I have made trailers for this year. Be sure to check hers out too!

This year’s focus theme for LIAF is ‘cutout’. Inspired by my previous animation ‘AIRMAIL‘ and the BBC Blue Planet documentary ‘The Deep’ I wanted to try and create an exploring experience of the London Thames. For all we know, there might well be jellyfishes and octos in it!

-Bianca Ansems

Sweeping and simply engaging, another great piece from Nexus Productions and Clapham Road Studios- ‘Back to the Start’ by Director Johnny Kelly with Director of Photography Matthew Day.

Chipotle commissioned this impressive short to show their support for sustainable farming practices. The downloadable soundtrack is a quietly compelling cover of Coldplay’s ‘the Scientist’ sung by Willie Nelson.

The lighting seamlessly communicates the film’s story progression.

Director Johnny Kelly: “Our DP Matthew Day did some incredible things with Dragon – hooking up several motion control rigs and over forty space lights to change / react as we advanced to each subsequent frame.” Lighting was controlled with the help of the Dragon DDMX2.
Matthew talks to us about mastering this complex shoot:

The idea behind the lighting was to try to emphasize the different moods of the farmer as we travel with him through the changing seasons and times of the day. 

It was obvious that a two minute shot would be too long to light, shoot and animate in one go, so I suggested to Johnny that we could break the shot into four manageable segments using different parts of the set to wipe in front of the camera giving the illusion of one continuous move. I worked closely with Graham Staughton, the production designer and Mark Davies the 3D previs artist to achieve this. We lined the rig and sets back up at the beginning of each week then started programming and lighting again using the previs, overlaying the live feed in Dragon as a guide.

We used an Arri studio 10k lamp for the key light and the fill light was from space lights overhead through frames with Grid cloth as low to the set as possible. We supplemented the space lights with extra 1 and 2k’s with coloured gels, this wrapped around the fronts of the puppets quite nicely and hopefully looked fairly natural without getting in the way of the moco rig or the animator. Due to the fact that the lighting had to change as the camera moved along, all the lights were programmed to be digitally dimmed using the dragon dmx controller. I wanted to keep the shadows from changing angle too much so we manually tracked the 10k along with the action, and as the sun started to set we wound down its stand to lengthen the shadows and dimmed down the lamp which gave a warmer, more evening like, quality of light. The DMX controller in dragon allowed us to preview the lighting transitions at different frame rates and exactly control the levels. This would have been impossible without the DMX facility in Dragon as we had to shoot multiple clean passes of the move, some of which took nearly 4 hours. The whole shoot took a month and a lot of late nights!

-Matthew Day

Making it look easy.

The equally epic making of video:

See more production stills

Brent Yontz, producer and DP of ‘Nanuq‘,- speaks with us about his 18-minute live action/stop motion animation film. The stop motion portion of the film was directed by Jill Jones and photographed in Los Angeles at Bix Pix Entertainment Studios. The film is just beginning the festival circuit. Brent gives us a great in-depth technical interview.

How did DSM help in the project?

Brent Yontz:

From a cinematographer’s standpoint, Dragon’s digital densitometer was a crucial tool throughout the process of Nanuq. Because so much of the stop motion was photographed in a monotone wash of blue moonlight, the general process of lighting was similar to that of lighting for black and white, placing heavy emphasis on the grayscale values of each shot. I would light primarily by eye and with my Sekonic light meter, then tweak things to fall nicely into the software’s grayscale values to place my highlights, midtones and shadows.   

The live action was photographed on 35mm Kodak Vision 3 5219 on a Panavision G with Super Speed lenses, and Super 16mm Kodak Vision 2 7205 on an Aaton XTR Plus in 1.85:1. For the stop motion, we photographed on a Canon Rebel XSi in RAW 4272 x 1788 2.39:1. Shooting in RAW provided extended latitude in the highlight regions of the digital sensor that would otherwise be clipped in JPEGs. This also provided cleaner keys and compositing with the additional information, as well as provided durable archiving capabilities when converting the RAW data to DNG files. Digital matte paintings and compositing were achieved in Adobe After Effects in the native 4272 x 1788 resolution and converted to DPX sequences for a possible 35mm film-out and down converted to 1920 x 804 for HD distribution.

Motion control camera moves were achieved with two rigs, one system built by Dick Kaneshiro that ran on Kuper Controls allowing X,Y,Z-axis and pan and tilt camera movements, and one manual 4′ slider that provided movements on single axis camera moves. 

Ashley Arechiga, Nanuq animator, on Dragon Stop Motion features she appreciates:

Dragon Stop Motion helped us so much through the entire process. It aided us in planning all our shots from camera moves to track reading. The cinematography tool was most helpful in making sure we consistently carried the director’s vision through every frame of animation. We especially enjoyed the toggle and short play features when working with the bigger puppets in creating an illusion of depth…and making them look like they’re dancing. The layout and general accessibility of the program made it especially efficient when we had multiple people working on one shot.

Beautful and dynamic work, team!
Here is a visual effects breakdown video and some production shots:

French Canadian Director, Cinematographer and Photographer Christophe Collette created this gem from 2009- ‘Ce Soir’- a music video for the band Monogrenade.
This film reads like a well articulated dream. It makes full use of haunted yet bright empty spaces- it is neither too dark nor too sweet, yet does an artful dance between the two. The wild and rough forgotten landscape and the beautifully weathered abandoned house give it a sense of being outside of time. Casually elegant cinematography- the missing figures and floating clothes remind of the psychology of a Magritte painting. The angled glowing light is the main character and sets a lonely yet quietly portent scene, an evocative sense of longing, like an Edward Hopper. The slight staccato of the animated movements- like the static of an electric bulb, and the hovering objects and sudden appearances all lend to the poetic suspension of disbelief.

Here Christophe tells Dragon about the challenges of the marathon shoot:

This was a really low-fi shoot with multiple cameras. We used 4 Canon 5D MKII’s with Canon Series L zooms, one of the cameras was tethered to DSM, the other cameras were just working intuitively. We shot this in 4 days so you can imagine that we pretty much shot non-stop. We shot something like 10,000 pictures and edited down to a little under 2,000, the editing process could have been a lot more simple if everything had been shot with DSM that’s for sure. I did not know from the start what sort of stop-motion feeling I wanted out of the piece, I knew that in the time I had to shoot this I could have never achieved fluidity but we aimed for something that wasn’t too jerky either. My editor worked out a fantastic rhythm out of all that material and I am so grateful to him, I think he spent three weeks on the edit…

My inspiration on this was Jan Švankmajer’s Alice and the photography of Todd Hido for the darkness.

The house was the most important thing in mind at the start of the project, I needed the perfect house, because there was no art budget at all, the whole piece was shot on a 15K budget so there was no way we could afford to create a set like that one. We drove the countryside for weeks trying to find an abandoned house that I liked, we saw many, the one we selected was almost the last one we found- we had almost given up, it was in a field in a remote area in the Laurentians in northern Quebec, the windows had been covered with planks so we could not see inside the place. We looked for the owner of the house, found him and his daughter let us in. I cannot describe how amazed we were when we walked in. It was exactly what we had in mind.

The place was empty though, and I needed props, old and abandonned looking props. We decided to drive around that house to find another abandonned one with furniture inside, so we found another house, in the middle of a old cemetary, it’s the house that you see in the lake in the intro, I thought it looked better from the outside than our main house. There are a few scenes which were also shot in that house, the ones with a lot of props, but mostly we loaded a truck full of stuff, old chairs, frames, beds and mattresses, stuffed animals, etc, and brought all that over to the other house for the shoot. We were incredibly lucky to find all that, the owner for the let us do whatever we wanted in the house, even tear down walls.

The lake in the beginning is actually not a lake but a fjord in Lofoten, Norway I had shot a few months prior to the shoot. I wanted to include in the video because I loved the ruggedness of it and I thought it worked well with the house and all.

About half the shots were done with puppets, the other half with band members or actors (our cook and assistant stylist/ art director) wearing green suits. The post was done on Autodesk’s Flame by Daniel J Kelly at Motor VFX in Montreal. Dan did a tremendous job with the roto and all, the lighting was not controlled, almost all the video was shot in natural light so there was a lot of tweaking in between shots… I am very grateful to him for his contribution on this, I initially thought I would have to photoshop the whole thing or teach myself After Effects!

So it was a labor of love as you can grasp. Monogrenade is my brother’s band so I wanted to help him out a bit!

The video got an amazing amount of international attention, especially for a french canadian band. It was featured on Motionographer, Shots, Boards, on the frontpage of Vimeo and on about 500 blogs worldwide and about a dozen film festivals. It also made Mashable’s top 10 stop-motion videos on youtube.

I am mostly a cinematographer and photographer, not a director, I have worked on many projects using DSM since Ce Soir but currently I am working on commercials, all motion work, no stop-motion. I’ll let you know if I take on another adventure such as Ce Soir in the near future. I know that I would never shoot something like Ce Soir without Dragon in the future, it simplifies stop-motion a lot.

- Christophe Collette

A trailer for Zealous Creative’s new film The Maker touring festivals right now.

The piece follows up their 2009 stop motion animated short Zero which hit 50 international film festivals, winning 11 awards including ‘Best Animation’ from LA Shorts Fest and the Rhode Island International Film Festival, two Gold Awards from the Australian Cinematographers Society and was nominated for an AFI Award in the ‘Best Short Animation’ category.

The Maker’s bizarre central character feverishly races against time, to craft ‘the most important creation’ of a lifetime.

It’s always nice when a film sets its own logic with a seamlessly eccentric visual language. The Maker’s low-key lighting, moody arcane colors & textures and the subtly askew angles of the set furnishings cast an enveloping tension, engrossing the viewer.

A lot went into constructing the scenography. The crew manufactured each tile, each floor board and designed some beautiful furniture. For updates on the festival tour and some great pre-production photos check the movie’s Facebook page.