DVD Research for Interface Brief

Im looking at mostly British horror DVDs but also some non-British ones for my research into DVD interfaces.

Nightwatch
The opening sequence shows moving blood vessels flying passed you as if your going through the body. Its really flashy with the colours changing to red then black and white. On the menu a splattery shape indicates what option you are on and changes colour when you press play. This makes it clear to see where you are and what your selecting. Nothing moves on the different menu screens and there is no transitional sequence which makes it quite boring. The writing is blurry and yellow on red which is hard to read. What is amazing about this film is the subtitles which interact with the movie. The words appear in loads of different ways like fading, flashing and even turning into blood. It would be interesting to see this done on the menu of a DVD.

Severance
For the opening sequence the head of an office guy falls off and blood spurts out. This dark humour goes with the mood of the film. Then it goes to the menu screen and every so often splatters of blood fall out the body which is swaying. The sound is like wind blowing and squelches as blood comes out. I like the way the screen slides to the side when you select something. The scene selections menu shows clips from the chapters in polaroid photographs which are hanging from swaying meat hooks. Here there is the sound of blades being sharpened. A blood splatter is the shape which moves to select a chapter. There is a simple white background throughout.



The Descent
Spooky cave wall for menu background with a spotlight hovering over the different options. The noises are of running water, screeches from the monsters, rocks moving beneath feet and echoey drips. You can't get anywhere without waiting for the torch light to go over that option then you have to quickly press before it goes onto something else and this is quite annoying. When you choose something you spinny round to a different cave wall in a fast swooshy motion. Drips of water fall down in some of the menus.





From Hell
Spooky echoey noises. Low opacity photo in the background of a street. Misty. Italic font to symbolise 1888. Everything is to do with anatomy and every page has got a different diagram of a body part. the text on the menus is all staggered and not on a baseline.






Slither
Alien slug slithers across screen to reveal the title. American typewriter style font is used which is slightly blurry and white. There are squelchy sounds with plinky plonky music. In the transitional sequence skin splits to reveal the chapter selections which are on a gross fleshy background. The screen has got black edges as if there is a spot light on it. Special features menu is a tree and every so often a slug crawls out. An out of focus family garden is in the background with kids laughing.


28 Days Later
Numbers count upwards on a black and red background til it reaches 28. On the menu there is the sound of wind and the scene is a deserted london street. Every so often a split second flash of the movie will appear. The only things that move are smoke going across and a newspaper blowing in the wind. The film's logo (similar to a toxic symbol) indicates what option you are on. There are no transitional sequences between menus.


Creep
Scene of inside an underground train. The picture is jolting around. A hand comes up very suddenly and slides down the screen leaving behind a blood stain. Cursor for selection is a blood splatter and there are train noises and screams. Text is written around the title. Transitional sequence - the lights go out on the train one by one until its black then the next menu comes up. This DVD one was easy to use with clear type. it uses different type sizes for different words which looks interesting. One menu features a wall with an eerie shadow on it.




Dog soldiersThe opening sequence happens too quick and there are too many things going on .The title is ripped with claws to reveal menu. Picking an option makes gun shots be fired through the background so the next menu can be seen. The different options are all over the place and not great for userbility because you don't know which direction to press on your remote.




American werewolf in london
Not a British film but set in London, the menu shows London bridge, the sky is misty and the moon rises up into the sky. The song 'Bad moon rising' by CCR makes it ironic, quirky and not cheesy, which I think is what makes British horrors so good.

Film titles/credits

YouTube - Casino Royale Title Sequence




The Casino Royale title sequence was done by UK based Framestore.  http://www.framestore-cfc.com/  Theire website displays other work they have done including the polar bears in Golden Compass and the famous Guiness advert.
 

With the help of Daniel Kleinman, the director, they produced this animated intro to the James Bond film. They used card motifs such as suits, Kings and Queens, to suggest the theme of the film and teamed this with imagery like cross hairs and blood to signify the violent nature of the film. Crosshairs turn into roulette wheels, Hearts and Diamonds appear as blood as they pour out of decorative vessels. Kleinman says "The titles have been a defining element of the Bond films for decades, and a defining feature of the titles has been the girls. Given the spirit of this new film, that simply no longer felt appropriate."
I like the fact that this is different to the other bond titles and I think it demonstrates how duplicating quite simple shapes and symbols can make a visually stunning animation.


Another great sequence is the credits from 300.  The company that did these  is Yu  +  Co  who said the look of the credits was intended to pay homage to the graphic novel at the end of the movie.

The only colours used are red black and yellow. The figures are silhouettes but are not completely static - a horses tail might move or a soldiers cape. The imagery is on layers  which are zoomede in and out, scaled up and down. and this seemingly simple movements actually give a dynamic end product. Splatters of blood go across the frame and the flat shapes in the background morph into objects. The type used is Frank Millers own artistic alphabet which helps to refer to the novel.
Yu + Co artists have edited the movie down and created what Yu calls "an echo of the whole story." In explaining the blood  Yu says "We wanted the blood to be like a volcano. Theres a lot of 2D blood in the movie and we ran with it as a unifying motif for the end crawl." On their website http://www.yuco.com/ their splash page is amazing in itself - a dandelion of animated seeds looks like its blowing in the wind while every so often type gets blown out of it. They also do the title sequence for desperate housewives which adopts a montage effect of images, taking you through the history of female anguish in different period art styles.

DVD Menus

I chose three Tim Burton movies to see what the DVD menus look like, how they are laid out and how you navigate around them. They all use elements of the film for example in Sleepy Hollow, you appear to gallop towards the tree, suggesting the horse which features in the film. A pumpkin and a sword are used in different areas of the DVD, and are animated when you press something. In the Nightmare before Christmas DVD the options are on a background scene of towers and pumpkins which is appropriate to the movie. These scenes are still images and the only moving parts are the flickering of light in the windows and pumpkins and the smokey sky, yet these small movements make the whole thing seem animated. The corpse bride is slighty different because the options are set over parts of the movie playing in the background. The type in all three is typically Burtonesque - like a horror font- which enhances the mood of the films. Looking at these has helped me think about the new brief because I have cosen to do a DVD skin and although I might not do something in the same genre as these films it is clear that the imagery and type has to be appropriate and engaging for your film. Also I have learnt that in the transitional parts when you press things on the menu you can be very experimental with what happens in these couple of seconds. These three DVDs were very computer based in their menus but I may consider using hand drawn/ written things in my work.

Visual Language - Editorial illustration

In the optional module session a few weeks ago we read a piece of text and then had to illustrate it to communicate the main points as well as we could. My piece of text was about how its better for an office worker to be lazy becasue then they never get blamed for doing anything wrong and how lazy workers can get to high positions by acting this way. This is what I came up with. I enjoyed doing this so I searched for editorial/newspaper illustrators on the internet and looked at images in newspapers.


This is a picture from Pugh, a well known cartoonist for the Times. The images accompany a newspaper article at the side with a caption underneath. This one was for a story about John Darwin the 'missing' man and how his wife went to claim his life insurance. The illustrator has put a humourous tone of voice on the article by having this image next to it.





This images are from J.T.Yost who has done lots of illustrations for the New York Times. Unlike Pugh, there are no captions but the images are detailed and you can tell what they are trying to communicate.




















These are by Noel Ford who also does illustrations for greeting cards and childrens books. He has done work for readers digest and other magazines and all his work is in this humourous cartoon style.




I think doing this kind of work would be interesting because you will be trying to put words into images and using signs and images to convey meaning. You have to use semiotics and know what images signify and how different meanings can be pulled from them. I think it's fascinating to see when an image can say just as much as written language can.

Pictoplasma

I went to the Pictoplasma festival in Berlin (23th-25th November) where I saw a whole feast of new and exciting animation in the form of short films, adverts, stings and music videos. I have always been interested in animation and think that it is something I would like to do professionally and this trip enforced my passion for it. The festival coincided with a new college module of digital design so I managed to gain lots of research for the new brief. I went to two of the lectures that were there, one by Studio Soi whose Lloyds TSB advert is currently on television and who have also done MTV idents. In their lecture they showed us the process they go through to reach the final outcome. They showed character designs, background designs, character expression tests, sketches and storyboards. This was helpful for my own work because it became clear that it is important to refine the idea as much as possible before producing the animation on computer. Tokyoplastic were the other lecture hosts I saw. They have worked for big clients like Toyota and also do a lot of their own projects. Their interactive website - www.tokyoplastic.com- is fun just to navigate through as everything is animated - they are particularly famous for their 'drum machine' which can seen on the website. Their work is influenced by anything Japanese from their characters
to the calligraphy on the website. This is helpful to me as one of my phobias for my work is Japanophobia and I can see how they have managed to signify Japan through images. The red circle of the flag, buildings, clothes, people and a red and black colour palette on the website all help to do this.

At Pictoplasma there was a small theatre that screened the smaller independent animations and a large theatre that screened the commercial, big budget/big client animations. It was interesting to see the differences in the two theatres and they were both brilliant but for different reasons. The animations in the small theatre were wierd and sometimes very abstract and very experimental in how they had been produced. The commercial ones were for the large part digitally produced, although some used other methods, and they seemed to be aimed at an audience you might refer to as the 'MTV generation'. They were funnier and more rude and offensive which made them slightly better in my opinion.
Amongst one of the programmes that showed the more commercial end of animation there were lots of E4 idents. I was particularly looking out for these because the new brief is to communicate a phobia through a given number (mine is 3) and E4 idents always involve the 4 in some way, whether its a character in itself, or characters interact with it. One of my favourites was a winner of Channel 4's esting competition (below). Its by Ginny Robertson, a free lance animator based in London who has also worked for companies like Aardman and Nexus Productions. The simplicity of the character and narrative is what makes it work and it was created in Flash, which is the programme we are using for our brief.



Other E4 stings that I thought stood out against the rest were done by the production company Hot Head Films. They have done loads of recognisable work including adverts for Quavers and Branston, as well as a music video for Robbie Williams. Theie E4 stings and other work can be seen at www.hotheadfilms.co.uk

want2bsquare

I read about this website want2bsquare.com which was a project by the design company Attik. They distributed a brief to talented emerging artists and creative production companies with the theme 'boxy' and the responses had to advertise the website. The website contains 16 of the responses as well as 6 different worlds (1 for every side of a cube) for you to play games and interact with objects. the worlds include one called 'The Beats' where you can play music related games, and one called 'Urban Zoo' where flash animated gorillas roam around.


Seeing these brilliant films I assumed Attik were mostly directed towards independent work, aimed towards people with an interest in design. But after researching them more I found they were a brand-building, global creative company with a very formidable client base, working for such companies as Coca-Cola and Virgin mobile. They were also responsible for the Adidas adverts in which the tagline 'Impossible is Nothing' is used. Their client base is evident on the website by the constant pop-ups of the new Scion model, from the car brand that has an on-going advertising campaign with Attik. Want2bsquare.com is part of this campaign. Nevertheless the films that are showcased on the site are amazing to watch and the interaction with these 6 different worlds kept me entertained for ages! One of my favourite films which was done by Attik is called 'rats with wings' which interviews a man complaining about pigeons but when you see the pigeons they're a special breed of boxhead pigeons its funny trust me. keeping the theme of having a box as a head this video uses still photographs and digital manipulation to animate this womans head into a square.



One of the companies involved in the 'boxy' brief was Buck who produced the animation 'Tower of Grantville'. It hosts a mix between 3D, 2D and illustrative animation. I like its creepy feel and the characters took real imagination. The tyrant 'Gumptin' oppresses gopher type animals.



Buck are a broadcast-design and motion graphic company who are similar to Attik in terms of their clients. They concentrate mainly on adverts and have done work for Nike, Burger King and Virgin Mobile. Tower of Grantville seems like an exception to their usual very commercial work. Tower of grantville was deemed by Attik, 'the best at meeting Attik's goal of getting people to go to the want2bsquare website. In the future buck would like to try doing film titles. They are showcasing at the Berlin Pictoplasma festival which i'm going to at the end of this month so i will hopefully see more recent work they have done. Here's a show reel of some of their work.

Collage

I've been thinking a lot recently about what kind of work I would like to produce in the big world of design. I love to draw and make images with pen and ink, but through looking at illustrated design all the time, Im constantly reminded that the standard of illustration out there is extremely high and I wonder whether there is room for me to compete. Last year I was inspired by the work of Daniel Eatock who produced this image by standing felt tips on end and balancing a piece of paper on the nibs. When talking about it he said:
'My best friend from high school is amazing at drawing. We went on holiday to the south of France and at the beach he started to draw the view. I could never compete with my friend at drawing so I had to invent new rules. My solution: I drew two straight lines across the page, I wrote 'sky' in the top part, 'sea' in the middle part and 'sand' in the bottom part. I realised in that instance the craft and skill of drawing can be overcome with an idea.'

This completely enlightened me and my confidence was boosted after discovering so many more who have succeeded through different means of image making. I was interested in a particular edition of the magazine IDN because it was called cut and paste and I thought it might offer more insights into illustration without drawing. It showed work from a number of collage/montage artists who are all very individual and different.


Among these are Julien Pacaud who uses existing digital images to create his collages on a computer. His images are surreal worlds, composing black and white photography and objects with bold colour. He often colourises the black and white images on photoshop to give them an unnatural look. His work and clients have included doing singles covers for the electro alternative band GoodBooks, a front cover for French magazine TGV (about excessive psychotropic drug use in France) as well as continuing to produce personal work. He is also creating a web experiment, Automatic Art, which is an application which randomly creates artworks constituted by various bits of photographs loaded in real time on the internet.








This collage edition of this magazine has informed me that there are countless ways to solve illustrative design problems and I shouldn't worry about pure drawing skill as it is (although considered by many the corner stone of design), not imperative for good work. If we all did things the same way life would be very boring.