I’ve been following Western Vinyl’s acts for a little while now. It started with Balmorhea, and then I found Here We Go Magic, and then Dirty Projectors, and now my latest obsession from their seemingly endless roster of awesomeness is Sleep Whale.
I know don’t know what’s in the water at Western Vinyl, but I’m not complaining.
Sleep Whale’s first EP, “Little Brite”, is out now and this memory-flash nostalgia-imbued vid came with its Japanese release. Radness.
When you die, I’m pretty sure heaven is a continuous screening of anything from F5 RE:PLAY. Seriously. And, the screenings are on the side of Angel Falls or something. And the sky rains Skittles. And the lakes are made of Grey Goose. But I digress…
The latest little bit of wonder to be borne from that kick ass short film festival is “Contraction”, a breath-taking (literally) vid from Christopher Hewitt & James Cambourne from The Ebeling Group’s film and animation studio Bearfight.
Via Motionographer
I’m into this. I like the whole minor-key funeral elegy vibe at the beginning, and, I’ll admit it, I’m a big sucker for anything that’s nicely shot underwater. I think it’s from the approximately 5000 times I watched “Splash” when I was a little kid.
I’m a big kid now, but I still get that same elemental, transformative water-feelings from the vid for Wild Beasts’ “Hooting & Howling”, directed by Ruth Render.
Digging around in the work of Takagi Masakatsu after my last post, I found this exquisite and joyous little ident for MTV Latin America, created by Sägas and set to Masakatsu’s laughter-filled song “Come March.”
Takagi Masakatsu is a true multi-media artist: designer, film maker, and musician. His work is emotional, elegant, and refined; it lights up with a clean purity and just a lovely, human essence.
In “Rehome”, with both music and video created by Masakatsu, his talents are displayed beautifully:
Mega ethereal vid, created in Processing, by Oscar Santamaria Rojo.
Beside being a kickass track, the video for Dirty Projector’s “Stillness Is The Move”, directed by Matthew Lessner, has a very odd, colonial, “Handmaid’s Tale” sort of vibe that I really dig.
Universal Everything is my favourite motion design studio in the world. Yesterday MTV International rolled out a brand new identity – to umbrella across all of it’s 64 channels around the world – created in collaboration with Universal Everything. So basically I just shit my pants…
Lots of people like to chirp that MTV is becoming increasingly irrelevant since it basically stopped playing music videos. Depite MTV’s undeniable shift to creating reality programming rather than promoting videos, you can’t exactly say that reality TV has been a big pop-bust. It’s culturally less worthwhile, arguably, but MTV has a history of innovative identity and design. If MTV exposes a lot of mainstream, Hills-watching folks to a level of design they wouldn’t normally see, then I consider that relevant. You never know when some kid is going to be zoned out in front of MTV, see a new ident from Universal Everything, and be inspired to learn more about art.
I’m so pumped to see this new work from Universal Everything. It is absolutely stunning. Working similarly to their epic series of sound sculptures “Advanced Beauty” (which is my favourite project of all time, just sayin’…), Universal Everything founder Matt Pyke again collaborated with a series of filmmakers to create each ident. Sound design, also just like “Advanced Beauty”, is by Pyke’s genius brother Simon (a.k.a. Freeform).
This stuff is all epic:
Via Creative Review
“Tancho” is a wonderfully murk and organic short, using ideas of evolution and nature to parallel Freud’s theories of the three levels of the human psyche – id, ego, and super ego – brought to life by film maker Oscar Sheikh.
Ok, so digging around on Kosai Sekine’s site after the last post I discovered another video he’d directed for Jempaur. Happy times.
Again, Sekine’s work, this time for “Beneath The Water Surface” is ridiculously awesome.
