Your degree is in graphic design; traditionally, most people would associate this with print/web design. I have seen some prints you have made, but it seems that film dominates the work found in your portfolio. What initially sparked your interest in film and how long have you been actively creating films?

I almost failed my penultimate year at art school. I didn’t have a great love for creating typography or layout although I’ll always have an admiration for the work of others who do it well. I asked my tutors (Steve Rigley & Jo Petty) if I could go off on my own and try some video experimentation. Luckily, they welcomed the idea and I haven’t opened InDesign since. That was in 2008, the same year that I created the Radiohead video. I owe a lot of thanks to Steve & Jo at GSA for allowing me to take that risk.

What inspired you to create Big Ideas (don’t get any), and what exactly did the conceptual process entail?

It was never intended to be a Radiohead project. Dr. Roland Shregle from Ganjatron.net wrote a tutorial back in the dark ages of the Internet on how to replace a default sound file that’s inside every HP scanner. The original file is Fur Elise and was intended as an Easter egg for early technology enthusiasts. I couldn’t help but notice the excellent bass sound and so the next logical step was to find other instruments that would accompany my bassist. Look Around You probably inspired the final treatment.

I was watching a lot of old vintage YouTube videos that had ‘psychic mediums’ apparently demonstrating supernatural abilities. I wanted to create a video which shows that science and hard work can be just as impressive as fraudulent trickery. I had been sitting on the concept for two years, but couldn’t write any decent music. When In Rainbows was released, I found myself inspired again and decided that Nude worked perfectly.

Has Radiohead contacted you about it? What did they think?

Colin left a nice post on their blog. He called it “brilliant” which is very flattering. I’ve followed their music since my school days and value their work a lot. It was a surreal experience to find out that they had watched and liked it.

What camera did you film it on?

A really crap Sony consumer HD SR-8 camcorder. It’s all I had but it worked. A lot of time and effort was spent on perfecting the overall grade trying to make pixels look like film. I wanted the camera to be from the same era as all these forgotten objects with only the actual music being contemporary. A key theme is that they’re all crying out for attention, trying to prove themselves still worthy of existence in order to avoid the inevitable landfill. According to online feedback it made a few people quite emotional so it looks like the characterisation of inanimate objects was a success. Props to Paul Rand for advising to defamiliarise the ordinary.

Where did you find all of the hardware that was used, were you looking for specific models to create the right sounds?

One man’s rubbish is another man’s treasure. The scanner was bought on eBay (as it had to be the particular model that Roland Shregle outlined) The ZX Spectrum was in the family, although I eventually used a different model for the audio (long grey one a +48k, also in the family.) It sounds much better but isn’t as visually recognisable as the small black Spectrum you see onscreen. A guy on an old mailing list actually noticed the difference in the beeps. Haha. If you feed the first minute of audio into your Spectrum at home, then your computer will play alongside my video. Thanks to Andrew Bruin for giving me the old Epson printer and my friend Daniel Glennie for lending me his oscilloscope. The problem I had with the Spectrums is that the viewer doesn’t have any visual feedback between the computer and the audio. So I wired it up to Daniel’s oscilloscope in order to get a visual representation of the audio. Thanks to Emma Keogh for the Granada Finlandia TV.

How long did the setup take?

I spent a full weekend alone in a studio filming it but had to throw all the footage away as I was plagued with sync issues. It was a very low-budget project so even transporting all the equipment to the studio was a huge problem. I took a few days off then tackled the studio again. This time I only needed a few hours and everything worked perfectly. You wouldn’t have seen the video if it hadn’t worked that day, as I graduated the same week. I had degree show stresses and honestly thought I was wasting my time making computers make noise. The online reception gave me a huge confidence in my work, and I’d like to thank everybody who offered their support. It really meant a lot to me.

Since college – it appears you’ve directed a number of music videos, was this your original goal or has it grown into an interest after you started school?

It was through necessity. The upside of the digital era we’re in is that a lot of skills are portable to different industries. I find it hard to tell people what I do for a living other than “make videos”. I’d like to call myself a director, although those projects are only recently becoming more frequent. Art school gave me an essential understanding of the importance of a solid concept. Everything else can be picked up.

Is there any specific influence for the aesthetic found in most of your films?

I found out early on that it’s effective to use nostalgia to stir up emotion. It’s the same gimmick that Hollywood is using to cash in on all of the re-makes of franchises we love from our childhood. A lot of my personal work reflects the past as I’ve often thought that we took a wrong turn somewhere in the late Eighties. I have tried to treat each commercial project as a unique piece of work and not get bogged down into a distinct aesthetic while keeping my inner-artist content with personal projects.

Your Frightened Rabbit music video feels quite a bit different than your others. Is there any specific reason for this?

There are two sides to the stuff I do. When I create work for myself, I’m in complete control and only finish when I want to show the world. The Frightened Rabbit video was a lot of fun and I really like the band. It was a commercial project to pay the bills.

What is the idea behind the flashlights in the crowd?

We only had £600 (including my fee) to make the entire video. To avoid spending money on lighting I asked all of the unpaid extras (Frightened Rabbit fans found on Twitter) to bring flashlights. I think it worked well considering the limitations of the shoot and helps strengthen the nautical/submerged/sinking theme. I’d love to do a decent-budget video for them as I think that they’re the most refreshing band to come out of Scotland in recent years. They deserve a huge international financial backing.

Do you have much time for personal projects? If so, are you currently working on anything?

I’m a very lucky person. The Scottish Art Council recently awarded me their 2010 film fund. I’ve been given a budget to create a new “major piece of motion graphics” and have been working on it almost exclusively since January. It’s a film about a magician who is in love with a video-game simulation of his dead wife. He has a moral struggle between self-delusion and being honest with reality. It’s based on some research I did while writing my dissertation, I’d secretly record Glasgow psychic mediums giving “readings” to members of their spiritualist congregation. It’s really exploitative stuff. My film won’t be as direct, as I’m using the metaphorical world of video games to tell my story. The Daily Mail [Fox News of the UK] didn’t understand my concept and wrote about the film here.

Sebastian Lange is a German motion-graphics artist. He is best known for his widely viewed, self-described “experimental kinetic type animation” animation, Flickermood 2.0. The piece is collected, sophisticated and vivacious, but retrograde with its soundtrack and film-like dust and scratches. The Journal corresponded with Mr Lange over the last month and asked him about his project:

What got you in to motion graphics?

I think it started since I have been able to draw and paint, and when I was at school I got a book about Walt Disney animation techniques from my father. From that point on, animation was always something very fascinating for me – I used to draw a lot of flip-books at that time. I also did a lot of music and band-playing. There has always been a huge admiration for cd-covers, artist posters and music videos. After finishing school I didn’t really know what to do: studying or making music?

I went to the internationally known Basle School of Design in Switzerland – what seemed to be a good decision – and, luckily, I passed the entrance examination. I did five years of studies at the graphic-design master-class, and I specialised in motion graphics and new media. We were taught old-school animation techniques as well as new software tools like Final Cut Pro and Adobe After Effects. I gained some good knowledge in drawing, graphic design, Swiss typography and typefaces. After the studies, I first worked freelance and then became the Creative Director for Motion Graphics and New Media at qu-int.com in Germany. There I had the opportunity to work on a lot of interesting projects with bigger clients.

What’s the inspiration behind Flickermood?

I always wanted to combine the power of music with animated typography and graphic design to get beyond the usual ways of animated type.

When I did Flickermood, I took a long piece of time to experiment on the animation, searching for the right audio track and to try out some new things and styles.

I guess this is always a problem with commercial jobs: you don’t have enough time to experiment a lot – I guess if clients would pay a little more for this experimental phase the result would often be much better.

What were you looking for in a song?

I’m always looking for unique musical styles and handmade, more analogue sounds combined with some modern elements. I also like retro-sounding music that is remixed and sampled (like Flickermood). And it’s always good to have an audio track with many peaks and breaks, because this makes it easier to animate motion graphics on the music.

How long did it take to find what you wanted?

I found Flickermood [the track title and subsequent project name] by accident somewhere on iTunes, so I didn’t really search for it.

Was there this sort of “aha!” moment when you first heard it?

Yes, I thought that this would be the perfect song to work on in a motion graphics piece. It has a lot of great musical moments as well as surprising breaks and rhythmic figures all coming from the remix of this retro track. I’m also a guitarist, so I’m really interested in music and how it can be used to accentuate motion graphics, animation and film.

Did you pre-visualize or envision something?

Yes – I tried out a few animation styles before I found the music, and for some compositions I drew type on paper sheets or made drafts in Photoshop. Most of it was done in After Effects directly in the compositions.

I started working on it and I sent out some previews to Forss [the artist behind the song]. He was really surprised and liked the project. We started to think about the text for the typography animation.

At that point, Percy Shelley’s poem Mutability came to our minds, and I started using it for the animation. It also fit very well to the Flickermood track: In Mutability, Shelley basically says that nothing endures but change, and change is something that is always very clear in this musical piece. Change is also the only constant in our world. Flickermood expresses this through pulsing, throbbing, shifting and repositioning of typography and music, floating in fluid, drifting randomly but always precise and consistent.

Is that Helvetica you’re using?

Yes – it’s good old Helvetica. I know that I gets a lot of use, but I liked the retro style for this piece.

Flickermood appeared at a handful of festivals (including the 2009 International Festival of Cinema and Technology, the 2008 International Amsterdam Film Festival and 2008 Adobe Showreel). How was it received?

Some of them worked like a catalyst for the clip: if you are at one big festival you get a lot of new possibilities to screen your movies on other festivals. Generally, Flickermood was received very well and people like it very much.

I also showed it at some graphic design festivals and conferences and it always got a lot of applause. At one festival in Germany I had the chance to jump in as a speaker for David Carson (who couldn’t come) and the clip did very well. I also have been asked a lot about my animation techniques and whether I would do any tutorials on After Effects. A national German TV channel, ARD, even did a short documentation on the piece.

Are you planning on taking it elsewhere?

At the moment I’m not really planing to take it on more festivals.

What are your plans for the future? Any new motion graphic pieces in the works?

Yes, a lot of nice things coming up. Last weekend I was on a shoot with a group of light-painting artists from Germany called Lichtfaktor. We did a stop-motion shoot with long-exposure light animations for a local energy company which was really a good experience for me.

Another cool thing I’m working on is a trailer for Dipdive, a music film project, which I can’t really talk about a the moment, but it’s going to be great.

I’m planning some new personal projects for our experimental platform, My Name Was God, which I hope can be done by end of the year.

How do you feel about this idea of kinetic typography – a type that moves, is dynamic? What do you feel are the implications for the future?

What is really great about the kinetic type is that it has the ability to emphasis words like we do in the spoken word with our voices. So we can put a lot more expression and emotion on moving typography than in print. This is something that’s of course widely used in motion graphics and film, advertising, etc, but maybe we can also use this for new user interfaces on new devices (e.g. touch screens). If you think about the iPad and its new way of displaying magazines that have formerly been known for their print versions: I think it would be really cool to add some nice kinetic typography, not only for advertising but also to make articles, stories and interviews look more fresh and more adequate for their target audience.

Sorry I’m Late is a fantastic short animation by director Tomas Mankovsky. This was shot at the Amadeus Centre in London in December of 2007. The film was shot with a 1:1 ratio, successfully shattering my expectations of the limits of film and animation. Documentation on the creation of this piece can be found at the film’s website.

Mankovsky wanted to build the illusion of a moving ground. To achieve this he initially moved the camera with a set background. Then he decided this wouldn’t work.

Instead of moving the camera for each frame we thought we’d make a fake floor out of pillows and other random stuff we could find at home. If we moved the floor for each frame it would give the illusion as if someone was walking forward.

The set

Plenty of light was needed in order for it to work.

Tomas explaining how the shark attack will work. There was no guide for the animation so "everything was based on gut feel".

These films come from the Korean artist and animator Choi young-hoon under the moniker NXK. The still frame Vimeo had for RUN.RUN.RUN was enough to draw me in. It exhibits bold and detailed line drawings combined with a very quick frame rate. It’s reminiscent of old 2-dimensional adventure games in many ways including even the music. I can’t help but feel bad thinking of my dust-covered Sega Genesis when watching this.

Immense amounts of time must have been taken to direct this piece to its final form. It’s apparent that every element, down to the smallest detail, has been thoroughly planned out and executed. The characteristics of the wood in the forest area is fantastic, lines and shapes are passing by at lightning speed with unique forms and textures emanating from each tree.

Decalco X stomo utilizes a unique approach to stop motion and the use of paints. Encompassing all aspects of the medium: how the colors bleed into one another, the consistency of the substance, its reflective nature, the heightened texture it can shape on paper and more. There must be a story behind each of the sheets of paper, but it remains an unsolved mystery in my mind. By the end of this second animation the viewer begins to see this repeated character as NXK’s emerging trademark.

NXK is making a place for himself amongst animators and will hopefully continue to produce and collaborate with other artists. With his uncommon blend of styles there is a wealth of new material pleading to be manifested.

Upper First is a motion graphics firm with offices in Sweden and Spain. They have only been around for about a year, but they already have an impressive reel.

From Upper First’s website:

Built on a foundation of creativity, credibility and freedom of thought, our productions entice the imagination beyond the expected. Through the value of awe and entertainment our communication aim to increase brand value and awareness. Every project will stretch our limits, challenge convention and result in a high-end visual experience.

Here is a neat spot they did for the Swedish interior and exterior design company Colorama:

And another, for Swedish public transportation:

They have an excellent website designed by Studio KXX and more samples on their website and Vimeo. Be sure to check them out.

Motion graphics artist Tomas Nilsson made this short animation for a school project to reinterpret the fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood. It is visually simple while containing complex information. Its a fun, unique take on the classic story. Enjoy!