Multimedia Spotlight: Vocal Improvisation Animated

How a laptop and a highway play together, or what geometry has to do with music.

Today’s short-and-sweet is Improvisation 2 — an audiovisual experiment by multimedia artist/singer Fredo Viola, who explores the environment solely with his voice and what he sees around him.

The vocal improvisation was recorded on a laptop mic, then stunningly animated using footage from New York’s West Side Highway arranged into a mesmerizing swirl of circles and hexagons.

The video is intended to be experienced in a more interactive way that allows you to drag, drop and play with the various spinning shapes — give it a spin.

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Beautiful Connections: The Art of Conversation

The color of conversation, 6 million colors, and why Flash is more antisocial than your misanthropic uncle.

Universal love for the iPhone aside, when it comes to the creative exploration of a gadget’s cultural context, Apple has nothing on Nokia. To promote the Nokia’s E71 smartphone, Wieden + Kennedy London came up with Beautiful Connections — a multimedia homage to the art of conversation.

From text art to a mobile app to short films inspired by the beauty of everyday conversation, the microsite is pure visual indulgence.

It also invites visitors to create their own audiovisual art piece, using their computer’s webcam, microphone or keyboard to explore how text, sound, color and motion influence your message. Here’s ours:

The winner of the film contest, Ewan Watson, used rotoscoping to create S I G N A L S — a colorful play on communication signals.

You can see the other 4 film finalists here, here, here, and — our uncontested favorite — here.

Which brings us to our only gripe with the project: The inherent unshareability of Flash content — the medium blatantly contradicts the message if none of the work can be shared in “everyday conversation” via individual permalinks or… gasp… embed code.

How did the W+K team miss the irony here?

Animation Spotlight: Forget

Balloons, nested dolls, and a man with a cardboard box on his head.

Today’s short-and-sweet is a possibly bizarre but positively breathtaking music video for Vania & The Master‘s Forget, directed and animated by German motion graphics artist Michael Fragstein.

Enjoy.

We Got Time: Hand-Illustration Meets In-Camera Animation Magic

What a French invention from 1877 has to do with superb modern animation.

A couple of weeks ago, a fantastic video for Moray McLaren‘s We Got Time made waves with its brilliant in-camera animation magic. It’s pure creative genius — despite the utter visual indulgence, it isn’t stop-motion, no computer super-imposing was used, and everything you see is exactly what rolled off the camera.

The animations in the side-on views were produced by the camera capturing the moving reflections from the mirrored carousels, and the animations in the top-down views were created by matching the cameras frame rate to that of spinning record.

Now, we go behind the scenes with London-based animator David Wilson, who directed it and hand-drew all the illustration.

Beyond being a pure joy to watch, We Got Time is a testament to our belief that creativity is simply the genius of combining existing resources — knowledge, ideas, inspiration — in completely revolutionary ways: In this case, a vintage Praxinoscope device and old-school hand-drawn illustration.

Brilliant.

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