Gorillaz - Feel Good Inc.

The video I chose for this blog is Feel Good Inc. by the Gorillaz. This band has shown creativity in the past by using animation during their live performances. The video is a 2D animation that is animated by Robert Valley, Heath Kenny, and Rikke Asbjorn. It was directed by Jamie Hewlett and Pete Candeland, and the production company is Passion Pictures. This video is very entertaining because it tells a story and the animation is done very well. Check it out!

Unity and The Butterfly Effect

Happy almost Thanksgiving everyone!

The clips I have this week are made from a program called Unity which I may or may not have talked about before. It is a game development program which is free to use and offers a pretty professional interface for beginners like me to get their feet wet in developing 3D games. With the release of Unity 4 a lot of new features have been added, so the developers teamed with Passion Pictures and Nvidia to create an animated short showing off the goods. Passion Pictures is primarily an animation studio, unfamiliar with working with game development software. The team at Unity knew this and wanted to see how their technology could be pushed in the hands of an animation studio outside of gaming and, well, the results are nothing short of fantastic! I was particularly intrigued by the highly detailed facial animations, created entirely by the free technology which exists with Unity. There's a lot of technical talk that I can't even begin to understand in the Making Of video... however next semester I'm enrolled in Game Dev and Technologies which plans to work with Unity in creating games so hopefully I'll begin to understand some of it. I'm extremely excited to begin learning this incredibly powerful tool for the industry I plan to work in.

And if you really enjoyed the video, I suggest watching this Making Of trailer, which shows the challenges and triumphs of each scene:

When Comics Come to Life

Last week, I explored a painting about the Boston Tea Party which took a 2D image and broke it down into layers. This week, I'd like to show you another example but go further. I present you with Coldplay's latest music video "Hurts Like Heaven".



In the video, the viewer is brought to a world where silence and grayscale is law until a few rebellious youths decide to break the norm and throw "sparks" all over town. These "sparks" are colourful and musical and they bring hope to the town. Everything seems fine until they're ambushed by the villainous Major Minus and his army stop the youths, and the viewer is left with a shot of another character named Mylo, foreshadowing events in future videos/comics.

Something to be said though about this music video is that it starts out showing the viewer that this is a comic book setting but begins to break that whenever the youths begin doing wondrous things with the "sparks" or when they are being chased. And by break I mean turn the 2D comic world into a 3D world where the camera travels through the motions of the kids.

This video was a collaborative piece from production company Passion Pictures, visual FX/animation studio Fortiche Production, Grammy-award winning British rock band Coldplay. and many other artists. I am looking forward to future videos that continue with the story and the exciting visuals.

Hurts Like Heaven is the second track off the Coldplay's fifth studio album titled Mylo Xyloto, released on October 24, 2011 by EMI.