In my head i have all these ideas of what i want my piece to look like and i'm still searching for new ideas. i looked back at a few things from other artists that i saw in the past and felt were really awesome. I found Kevin Dart's trailer for the fictional Yuki 7 movie "A Kiss From Tokyo" and thought that the use of camera and film grain was really dope. i also looked back at the film Tekkon Kinkreet and looked at its use of 3D environments that resemble the vanishing point as well as its bizarre plot. Examples after the jump...
In the summer of 2009, one of my favorite illustrators, Kevin Dart, rolled out his Yuki 7 campaign centering around a trailer for a series of 1960's espionage films that doesn't actually exist. Seductive Espionage: The World of Yuki 7 is the book that builds an entire world around the Yuki 7 character including movie posters, storyboards, and even information on the fictional actress that plays Agent Yuki. The trailer serves to authenticate this world Dart has created.
Dart fashioned together a ragtag team of his friends in order to make his concept a reality. Two of which, animator Stephane Coedel and composer Cyrille Marchesseau, helped him get his trailer together. All the work was done using After Effects. Coedel composed the film using layered illustrations from Dart and put them together based on her memories of old movies from the era, specifically the imperfections.
i find a lot of things pretty interesting about this movie: the characters are bright and designed very well, the music is enriched and very authentic, but most of all, the way the camera and layering was filtered makes it really look like it was from 1964. i really want my films to have interesting depth of field and focus tricks and feel that this trailer is an example of my intention.
Art Of The Title gives us a rundown with the makers of the trailer from pre-production to post.
After working with the vanishing point, i thought back to one of my favorite movies that i remember being immensely impressed with a few years ago. Tekkonkinkreet is a story about two orphaned street urchins, the rough and tough Black and innocent White. Together they are know as the Cats and must fight the Yakuza from taking over Treasure Town. Tekkonkinkreet is a play on Japanese words meaning "a concrete structure with an iron frame," and it suggests the opposing images of concrete cities against the strength of imagination.
The story takes on many themes. The names Black and White aren't just a description of personality, but tell the audience what kind of force the character symbolizes in the movie. This becomes apparent when the boys are separated by the police: White becomes lonely and begins to sink in to depression while Black becomes darker and more violent. Its also interesting how the groups of characters symbolize an animal and the interactions between these groups is somewhat based on the animalistic relationships.
The opening sequence for the movie sets the stage quickly and successfully. The crow flying through the congested city is visually stunning and gives the city a distinctive character.
PingMag.jp writes a fantastic article on how director Michael Arias turned Taiyo Matsumoto’s masterpiece into such an outstanding film.
Art of The Title gives us a bit of audio from the DVD commentary on the scene.
8.27.2009
Inspiration
8.26.2009
Ideas
Ideally, from a technical standpoint, i'd like to continue to work with the above project which i started on over the summer. I experimented with using mask interpolation as animation as i did in the previous class, but this time i integrated a 3D environment. I ran into a few problems but luckily i seem to have figured some of them out after the Vanishing Point assignment.
i'm not interested in trying to continue this specific video, but i want to use the some of the techniques and find an easier way to make the environment while maintaining my aesthetic.
Conceptually, i'm interested in masking and concealing. Do we hide our true selves behind facades or are those masks very much a part of our true identity. We masquerade to protect our vulnerabilities, or our pasts. Sometimes, we deceive others to shy away or perhaps even join them. These guises are as fragile as the idea of identity in itself, yet we still choose to conceal ourselves.
Jacques Derrida theorizes that our identities are not self contained, but constructed from language, culture, and history, and are therefore composites of experience and circumstance. I submit that masking, by proxy, is that manifested identity constructed totally outside of circumstance shaped by the other.
Vanishing Point
Evidently the vanishing point tool in Photoshop can be imported in to After Effects, which is great because now i can easily turn some 2D shit into some 3D shit and impress my friends with my visual prowess. I just used a photo of an old wood mill for the wall, a picture of the oceans and some mountains and a photograph of a building from the Forbidden City.
