Duelity: Earth’s Story, Split Down the Middle

Darwin vs. the General Organization of Development labs, or why truth comes in pairs.

Science and religion may be odd bedfellows, but they’ve always had a shared mechanism of propagation — both are simply the product of the stories we tell ourselves and each other to explain the world, be it rationally or emotionally or mystically. So what happens when these conflicting stories are pitted against each other? That’s exactly what Duelity does in a brilliant split-screen animation telling both sides of Earth’s story, winking at the evolution of human thought and language along the way.

Directed by filmmaker Ryan Uhrich and animator Marcos Ceravolo, Duelity is a curious hybrid of humor and philosophy, mythology and ideology, capturing the tensions and frictions inherent to our cultural storytelling.

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HBO City: Artisanal Animation Magic Circa 1983

Craftsmanship lessons from the 80′s, or why 100 lightbulbs are putting Tim Burton to shame.

With all the stop-motion, time-lapse, paper-cutout, tilt-shift, CGI animation floating around these days, it’s easy to fall into the all-too-common trap of modern arrogance, assuming we’ve practically invented these art forms and none of this has ever been done before, let alone well. We, of course, are here to wiggle a disapproving finger and prove otherwise.

In 1983, HBO made a short but impressive opening sequence that really embodied just what makes HBO “premium” — brilliantly conceived and produced with enough meticulous craftsmanship to make Wes Anderson feel inadequate and send Tim Burton’s set designers running to mama.

Now, a short documentary goes behind the scenes of the elaborate production process.

If there’s something missing, you know something’s missing, but you don’t know what it is. So you put in as much detail in it, so the eye picks up every little thing.

Six craftsmen worked for over three months to create close to 100 unique buildings for the 30-foot-long HBO City, each handcrafted with painstaking precision to produce one of the best-constructed model cities ever built — with working lightbulbs in all buildings, headlights on the cars and buses, and hundreds of unique trees covered in handmade foliage.

Even when the model was finally completed, bringing it to life as an opening sequence was equally elaborate — it was photographed with a bleeding-edge computerized camera, filming for 14 hours something designed to last 20 seconds on the screen.

We didn’t want just a line. We wanted to communicate to the viewer that when they were turning on HBO, they were tuning into an entertainment center.

This sort of patient, labor-intensive, artisanal entertainment craftsmanship is quite rare these days. (Though the fantastic Moray McLaren We Got Time animation does spring to mind.) And while the digital revolution may have opened the doors to incredible CGI whimsy, we have to wonder whether it has also, ironically, reduced our capacity for such meticulousness. Could the digitally-induced shrinkage of our attention spans be eating away at our attention to detail — and at our tolerance for the effort require to attend to it?

Because in this world of ubiquitous Flashturbation, there’s still something to be said for the art and craft of old-fashioned, hands-on, painstaking creative tinkering.

via Movieline

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CreativeAllies: Artist, Meet Artist

Artist meets artist, or why street cred beats petty pay every time.

The cross-pollination of disciplines and talents is a powerful beast, and we find that it’s all the more prevalent in the creative sphere — lots of musicians also design and illustrate, lots of designers also mix music, lots of filmmakers play an instrument. Startup Creative Allies has stuck its flagpole in this rich intersection by matching visual artists with their favorite musicians to create anything from album art to tour posters to music videos.

It’s a simple yet brilliant concept: The “allies” — designers, photographers, illustrators, animators and creative types alike — upload their creations inspired by music, which can then be licensed to the musicians that inspired them if the latter choose to “activate” them. Musicians can post requests for whatever they need made, be it a radio commercial or a t-shirt design, and allies can browse jobs to find something that strikes a creative chord.

It’s sort of like Threadless meets crowdSPRING, only with far more gratifying street cred if your art gets chosen by the very musician who inspired it. Licensing fees range from $25 for a high-res photograph to $200 for a Flash movie, but said street cred is no doubt priceless.

So whether Ani DiFranco needs a tour poster or the Harvest of Hope festival wants a flyer, the only thing standing between artist and artist is a simple, free signup process open to anyone anywhere in the world.

Hailing from indie music marketing support outfit Music Allies, the team has previously worked with Ani DiFranco, Sia, Aimee Mann, Jack Johnson, Mason Jennings, Martin Sexton and many other such fine musicians. And we think they’re onto something great.

Check out Creative Allies for a wonderful dose of cross-pollinated creativity.

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