When Jaguar Racing wanted to showcase its civic and racing electric vehicles around the world during a global pandemic, they turned to okean storytelling agency and Floss Creatives to visualize the excitement on the track.
John Robson has spent nearly 20 years creating award-winning content for top brands, film, TV and games. A Southern California native, he left Late Lunch, the studio he founded in 2005, behind two years ago to take on a director job at HouseSpecial in Portland, Oregon.
French director and motion designer Slimane Aniss always wanted to create an animated series and two years ago he got his chance.
The last time Motion Designer Jon Lutjens collaborated with
Director Anthony Gaddis they were part of the team who made Mac Miller’s posthumous Good News video.
COVID-19 forced the world into lockdown last year, and that changed the way people work. Handshakes are out, facemasks are in, and many in-person meetings have been replaced by Zoom conferences. Even as some head back into the office, Zoom’s gridwork of postage-stamp-sized avatars of friends and colleagues remains a big part of a lot of people’s workdays.
There aren’t a lot of artists with a credits list like Emmy Award-winning Art Director Steven Messing’s. Over his long career, Messing has contributed to more than 50 film and television projects, including Avatar sequels, Avengers, Alien Covenant, Transformers, Game of Thrones and Stranger Things.
Madis Epler worked as a graphic designer for several years before realizing he was really more into animation. So he pursued that goal, digging deep into tutorials, books and everything related to 3D. Now a busy freelance creative director, animator and CGI artist, Epler runs his own studio, Banzai Animation, in Estonia where he grew up.
When COVID-19 shut down live-action production last year, unforeseen opportunities opened up for many 3D artists, including Los Angeles-based motion designer Jan Sladecko
New York City-based director Saad Moosajee has always found Renaissance art interesting because “it evokes God and seems to have a holy quality whether there are literally angels or just dark, moody figures,” he explains. Even so, it’s an aesthetic he hasn’t found much use for until recently, when Japanese singer-songwriter, Joji, contacted him about directing a music video for “777”, a track from the artist’s latest album, Nectar.
Freelance art director/motion designer Takayuki Sato is currently living in Japan, where he was born and got his start in the industry. But his career was meaningfully shaped years earlier when he moved to the US to study motion graphics and English.
Jayse Hansen remembers exactly where he was when he realized what he wanted to focus on as an artist. It was 2005 and he was at a design conference listening to fictional user interface (FUI) pioneer Mark Coleran describe how he created FUI for films like Mission Impossible, Alien vs. Predator and The Bourne Identity. Watching intently as Coleran presented his screen designs for mini spy cameras, holo tables and FBI forensic labs, he thought: “That has to be the best job ever.” Though he knew nothing about how to get started, he knew he wanted in.
Toronto-based director/animator Nick DenBoer has been collaborating with electronic music producer and musician Joel Zimmerman (aka Deadmau5) for years. It’s an odd pairing in some ways—Deadmau5 (pronounced dead mouse) is internationally recognized for his original, well-engineered sound and straight-talking demeanor. DenBoer (aka Smearballs) is known for being uniquely talented at making super weird stuff, including some surreal branding for KFC.
TV series titles don’t usually need updating from season to season. But with the hosts leaving the theme park to head out into the real world in Westworld’s season 3, the time was right to make a change. Asking the question, “What would it look like for a machine to look back on the world of Westworld’s first two seasons, Antibody collaborated with AI Fiction to create “machine dreams” for the title sequence, which explores what the characters go through as they struggle with their new freedom.
Mick Jagger, David Bowie, Bob Dylan, Ray Charles—and so many others—had exceptionally talented backup singers who helped make them famous, though those singers are much less well known. In truth, the same thing could probably be said for most artistic genres and, fortunately, there are events that help recognize some of those unsung folks, like the British Academy Television Craft Awards.
L.A.-based art director Sasha Vinogradova’s animated short Forest is an environmentally conscious fairy tale that doubles as a grim fable about humans’ capacity for destruction. Made with Cinema 4D, Arnold, and After Effects, Forest is a milestone in Vinogradova’s fast-developing career as a visual artist and art director.
Spurred on by the free time imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, Brussels-based motion graphics artist Fabian Aerts decided to fulfill his dream of creating a TV title sequence.
When freelance animation director and designer, Russ Etheridge teamed up with his wife, Ayndrilla Singharay, to make a fantastical film loosely based on a Hindu myth, they didn’t plan on their production schedule coinciding with the birth of their first child. But things don’t always go as planned and, looking back, they can hardly believe they managed to finish Armstrong, a 10-minute 2D/3D short about love and strength and what happens when the moon suddenly disappears.
Sekani Solomon’s short film, Star Wars: The Last Stand, was viewed nearly 2 million times in the first two months after he posted it on YouTube. It was a pleasant surprise, to say the least, Solomon says, particularly since the film was a personal project that started out as a gag when he was working as a motion designer at Imaginary Forces in 2016.