TiER1 Blog
OFFF Cincinnati: Let’s Feed the Future
“Where did all the creative people go?? Footloose just came out!” Spouted Joshua Davis Thursday night. OFFF Cincinnati had begun with a bang and I was eagerly awaiting what the next day had in store for us.
To give you a little background, OFFF (Online Flash Film Festival) was started by Hector Ayuso, a Barcelona-based graphic and motion designer, in 2001. The festival has primarily been held internationally, with stops in Barcelona & Paris over the last couple of years. Now it was making it’s 2011 U.S. debut in Cincinnati, Ohio and what a better place to host such an event than the Contemporary Arts Center located downtown. Cincinnati’s art & design community was very well represented, meaning there were a lot of dudes wearing these & these…but I kid. Let’s dive into the stellar lineup of speakers…shall we?
Brosmind
An insanely talented pair of illustrators who happen to be brothers. This duo was the perfect choice to pull the 9:30 slot…HIGH ENERGY! There presentation consisted of an audience driven keyboard (more on this in a sec), two mascot suits, a FaceTime chat with their mother, and free postcards & stickers for the audience. Now, more on that keyboard. It was wireless, assisted with their presentation, was given to a member of the audience, and that member was ME.
Here’s a pic I shot of it:
Basic keyboard functionality included buttons for: kicking, punching, popping up a mariachi dude with a mustache, animating a floating turd across the screen, etc. Pretty basic stuff.
Julien Vallée
A really talented designer & art director from Montreal, Canada. The best part of this presentation for me, was the breakdowns for all his shots. Plenty of behind the scenes footage to show here, and there’s no better way to demonstrate how something was pulled off than by showing the unpolished raw footage. A great example of this is the making of Danse Dance an interactive video.
Lernert & Sander
Two Dutch directors who love to celebrate Easter…you can just tell (see Chocolate Bunny). One of my favorite pieces they presented was a poster series commissioned by Werner Borkes for an Amsterdam Gay & Lesbian Film Festival.
The Mill - Jeff Stevens
This was the presentation I was most geeked for. The Mill is an outstanding VFX company that boasts the work to prove it. Jeff Stevens is the Design Director of their New York office. His presentation contained a ton of breakdowns for some of their commercial work (see here, here, & here). One of the more impressive things showcased was an interactive display that The Mill uses to showcase their entire portfolio of work. It’s called Mill Touch, and it is incredibly cool.
The most valuable point I took away from Jeff’s presentation had to do with The Mill evolving as a company. For many years The Mill had been a juggernaut in the industry and were thought of as purely a post-production company. When more and more small companies started creating the same kind of work that The Mill was producing, it was evident that something needed to evolve within the company. That evolution came in the form of a new Design Department, that up until a few years ago, The Mill didn’t have.
VASAVA
VA-who? Vasava is a is a communication studio with 18 designers specializing in print, web, motion, 3D animation, and video. Vasava’s philosophy on creativity is broken down into six steps:
1.) Teamwork
2.) Effort
3.) Inspiration
4.) Cohesion
5.) Evolution
6.) Technology
Vasava put together the opening titles for OFFF Cincinnati and they were beautifully done. Check it out here.
Joshua Davis
This guy is kind of out there, but in a good way. The passion he has for design is palpable, and that is refreshing to experience. He has spoken at every OFFF since it’s beginning, and has a TED conference under his belt also. I suppose I would describe his workflow as programmatic design. He is obsessed with patterns, and finding them in everyday scenarios. Using his own proprietary software he generates artwork from basic shapes in a way that would take the human hand years to accomplish. He designed the graphical display for IBM’s Watson (The Face of Watson), which if you watch Jeopardy you may recognize.
Hopefully Cincinnati will be a target destination for more conferences like this. It was a great opportunity to network with others in the art community and gain perspective from great conversation.
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Comment for OFFF Cincinnati: Let’s Feed the Future
In addition to the skinny jeans and flatcars that Mark mentioned…. The presenters all wore black, zip up hoodies on opening night…. it was “unplanned” and adorable!! Even though they fit the designer-style stereotype, these guys each had a different approach to their work that reflected in their storytelling.
Brosmind came out like RIchard Simmons after chugging a can of Red Bull – super high energy! They really wanted the audience to be invested. They took the first step by breaking the ice… in florescent colored costumes… while sharing their childhood… and introducing us to their mother. Potential embarrassment was no longer a factor. As they told us their story, they invited us to participate through the use of a “commentary” keyboard that was linked to the main presentation. The keyboard was given to a lucky studio audience member (Mark), who could press a key whenever he wanted to comment on the presentation (and he did quite a stellar job might I add). This presentation interaction allowed the audience to participate in the story and laugh along with the brothers. The brothers then passed out postcards, asked everyone to draw a picture on the back, and then send it to the Brosmind studio. Through sharing, participation, and invitation, the brothers became approachable and we became a part of their story.
Julien Viallee gave people the opportunity to interact with a story already in progress in the video, Danse Dance. The concept of the project was a video playing throughout the whole piece. In this video, there was a desk filled with objects the user could interact with. As the video played, the user could click an object and it would animate. Even in a guided environment, the user still had a direct effect on the story.
Joshua Davis translated human emotions to a supercomputer with the development of The Face of Watson visualization. The visualization was implemented to humanize Watson based on his confidence level. Watson would take the question, evaluate it and then come up with a response. One of 24 pre-determined “emotional” states would appear, depending on how confident he was in his answer. Giving Watson that visual reaction is the building block that the audience can relate to and understand.
The collection of presenters and approaches demonstrated that a storyline can be applied in many ways, but is remembered when it engages the audience in an exploratory way and gives them the opportunity to fill in some of the blanks.