Daft Bodies - Harder Better Faster Stronger, Viral

This is quite a well known viral video for Daft punks popular dance track. It is made by two 22 year old Pre Med Students from california with no dancing background or media background. I really like this as it is such a clever idea and must have took a lot of work choreographing it all. The Silver helmets are a really good idea to as it keeps the dancers anonymous so you focus on the dancing and the words written on them. Also the Silver helmets tie in with a lot of Daft punks work as they often wear different futuristic space helmets in there promotional shots and on stage.

The original has over 6.6 million views and has been copied countless times by others, some of them are on the girls blog: Copycats!
Clearly this is an extremely successful viral video and shows that anyone with a good idea can impress millions of people.

Grant Gilbert - Guest Lecture

Grant Gilbert is a graphic/motion designer from Manchester, now working in London for his own limited company Double G Studios. He started out at Stockport college 20 years ago doing a national diploma in graphic design, then moved to a degree course at UCE in Birmingham he said the course was mainly print based and he felt that he wanted to do more moving image work. After a few months working in a bar he was offered a job at Planet 24 doing the telephone and fax number boards for the Big Breakfast. After this he went to channel 4 where he worked on numerous projects including title sequences, promos, and idents. He enjoyed working here a lot more as he had a lot more creative freedom, had a bigger budget to work with, and people actually got to see his work on the television. After 3 years at channel 4 he found an opening in Attik, New York so moved there for a year but wasn’t too impressed and didn’t work on anything significant so came back.

It was then he set up Double G Studios, which is initially just him as a freelance designer and for big projects he drafts in other designers of whichever specialist field is required. He said that he really likes doing this as the work he gets is always different and you get to work with lots of different people instead of just working on the same sort of briefs with the same people like he had in the past. Also he thinks being a limited company as apposed to just being a freelancer sounds more professional and that it gets you more work, especially bigger, high profile projects as the big companies tend not to want to trust just one designer with there advertising/campaigns.

The first piece of work he showed us was an advert for channel 4’s spin off music channel, called 4Music. He explained that he had an idea that he wanted to use for years but hadn’t got the right brief to use it on yet. The idea consisted of a man dressed all in black with lots of neon cables wrapped round him. He also was also inspired by music festivals, especially tents and people dancing late at night inside them casting vivid shadows against the canvases. He worked with a large crew and hired professional dancers, sourced neon cable from Germany, and filmed it all in a disused depot in the middle of London, then added 3d elements later and edited to the music track. He said that he does not like to be referred to as just a graphic designer as he always loved doing hands on sort of work like this and working with moving image.

4Music Advert

I really like this piece of work, the whole dark iluminous effect gives it a contemporary feel and the music is very well chosen as it isn’t too main stream or too genre heavy, as I feel if a predominantly ‘indie’ track or a heavy ‘dance’ track had been used it would eliminate viewers that didn’t like that type of music. Having seen this on television before the lecture took place I did not recognise the tents as representing the music festival scene, I actually thought the neon lights and darkness made more of an impact to me as representing summer and festivals, but either way I think it is a very successful piece of work.

The next piece he showed us was the idents for More4, for this project he was drafted in by Spin London, who had already designed the logo and wanted him to help with the moving image work. As with all his work he wanted it to look different from everything else on TV. He produced lots of different ideas and settled for 3 abstract animations where the logo appears seamlessly out of the patterns.

More4 Idents

The idents are really nice and the black and green colour scheme works very well and I find they have a very calming or relaxing effect to them especially the ‘wave’ one (3^rd on the video clip) and the second one also. I also think the use of the shapes from the logo is a good idea like only using circles and stretched circles.

BBC One was the next piece that he showed and he said that he was approached by a company called Red Bee asking if he would work on a pitch to rebrand the channels identity.

They did lots of research and came up with a number of ideas, the favourite being an influence from Korean football crowds holding up boards in unison to create huge moving pictures. They worked on this idea for months and even produced a demo featuring Davina Mccall. When they showed it to the executives at the BBC they were given the job but at the same time hated the idea and told them to go back to the drawing board. He then looked at the old branding from Abram Games in 1953 to the present day, one recurring factor in all the designs was the use of a circle, so they decided to work on this as a basis for their design, creating compositions using circles and changing the font to a circular lower case font.

BBC One idents

I think these idents are excellent, there is a lot of work and effort put into these and it is such a simple idea, Grant Gilbert said “Simple ideas always work the best”. The transition from the footage to the logo is smooth and even though they are all so different they still manage to get a bit of red into the design too which was one of the characteristics Gilbert wanted to keep.

The project took 10 months and a controversial 1.2million pounds (which Gilbert says is; “The sign of a good campaign!” but it is very popular and is still on air 2 years later.

Overall I was very impressed with Grant Gilberts lecture and Grant Gilbert as a person, I think his work is excellent, very professional and has a distinctive style. I think his business skills are top notch also, and have certainly played a part in his success as well as just being a great graphic/multimedia designer.

PES - 'Scrabble 60th Birtday'

This is a new update from eatPES.com that is commemorating the boardgames 60th birthday. The stopmotion techniques are great and I really like how as the word is spelt a little example of the word comes onto the table. This piece has the same feel to it as all PES' other work with a distinctive stop motion style. I hope to learn from their techniques and use them in my own stop motion work.