The day She danced for survival

Some time ago we filmed a time-lapse of María improvising again a dance in the kitchen. Having a look at the footage we realised this was not yet another silly dance. This time she was dancing for survival!

SheDancedForSurvival

So we’ve done a small animation to give testimony of this moment. We rotoscoped the dancing bits and added a bit of hand-drawn drama. The drama that usually comes after the dance, when the music stops.

Enjoy!

 

Interactive installation at Central Library

Interactive App

It’s been a really exciting weekend here in Manchester! An exhausting one as well! But we had a really good time working on the finale event of the Big Digital Project which was part of the Manchester Histories Festival 2014.

One of Manchester’s most iconic buildings, the Central Library, opened its doors again to the public last week after being closed for almost four years to be restored. And we had the chance to work on the interactive installation that filled its beautiful reading room ceiling with light and written words on Saturday night.

Manchester Library Installation 01

Manchester Library Installation 02
We were working lately on the custom software which made the interactive part of the projection mapping installation possible. The user interface was designed and coded in Processing: a minimalist easy-to-use application which allowed everybody to participate.

People came to express their own thoughts, responding to the question “What do you want to say?”. Their answers were captured and sent over via wifi to another control app we designed in Processing.

UserInterface

The beautiful thing is that all the people’s comments were projected on the library’s dome! A lively mixture of flashing words changing sizes here and there, all accompanied by live visuals and an awesome soundscape.

The library looks awesome! Go and explore if you have some time!

 

Sail Away

        Lately we have been working on an animated lyric video for the new single of Portuguese/Swedish musician Johan Rodrigues. The song, already released on 5th November, is called Sail Away and will be part of his next EP still in production. You can find the completed animation in here.

Man in boat

The concept for the video was totally inspired by the song. It transported us back to our sunny summer days in Spain. Maybe because of that nostalgia we started to visualize the song as a nice illustrated tale book. The kind of book you take out from the shelves once in a while just because it reminds you of a different time in your life.

We wanted to give the animation a hand-drawn feel so we drew the illustrations on paper and then painted them with watercolours. What a nice day we had! Everything was animated digitally, though we made the illustrations in the book move kind of jumpy to resemble stop-motion animation.

To make the lyrics a bit more personal we decided to design our own typeface. Also we tried to escape as much as possible from the usual paragraph structure seen in books and organized the text using more visually interesting layouts.

moonpagefaropagetypography

Sail Away
Sail Away

Our collaboration with Johan has been a really good experience. He trusted in our ideas from the beginning giving us lots of creative freedom over the video look. Also his creative input during the process was very important. He came up with really good ideas to improve the final video.

        Go and have a listen to the music of this talented artist. Sure you will like it!     http://johanrodrigues.com