Patrick Vale – Empire State of Pen

This is a sickeningly enviable thing to be able to do…

I’m not sure how Patrick (who is a London based artist) is drawing this, by memory or from a photo on his computer maybe. He dosent even seem to pencil it out first.. just gets on and draws it..

From the Vimeo site it seems it took Vale “about 4/5 days on and off, shot on iPhone so had to export a lot of pics every half hour!”

An amazing achievement and undoubtedly a lovely thing… and for £345.00 you can even get a beautifully coloured version.. very nice indeed.

Dubstep Dispute…

My good friend Wong seems to have a knack for finding cool things online…

This one is particularly good, if far too short… I like the yellow droid that gets so agitated he falls over…

And as for the interpretation of those huge dub step sounds… genius

Vimeo videos

I had some spare time yesterday so I had a little look around the Vimeo site, a place where film makers can upload their projects for the world to see. There are some amazingly talented people around making some wonderful things…

I particularly like these two…

Project: Desert Colossus, by Reginald Emvula and Joaquin Ardiles is a stunning flight of fantasy in which two men with huge hands and tiny legs, jump, fall and fly through an endless space, landing on large stone-like flying creatures that are moving inexorably toward some unknown horizon… and all set to a big guitar tune that I can’t quite put my finger on, but I think is the mighty Long Distance Calling

I really like the use of the limited colour palette, beautiful lighting and the seemingly continuous movement of the point of view, spinning and rotating, looking up, looking down, sometimes out of focus and at other times pinpointed on a sharply imagined detail..

The 3rd and the 7th by Alex Roman is a very different animal, but equally absorbing. Its a longer piece involving what looks like an amazingly choreographed sequence of both filmed and digitally created spaces referencing a number of famous buildings, including Mies’s Barcelona Pavilion, Khan’s Exeter Library and Ghery’s Guggenheim Museum.

Having said that, it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that it was all created digitally.. the construction and rendering of the images is so brilliantly realised that, until odd things start to happen that can only be digital (check out the peeling roof at 9.30 mins) it looks like it’s all been artfully shot on film. As you can tell, I have no idea how it’s been done, if it’s real or CGI or both, and in many ways it doesn’t matter, as the overall effect is visually so arresting…

Whilst the opening sequences with the camera are pretty good and the whole film is well worth watching, try skipping forward to about 2.00 mins when the architecture starts… that’s when the soundtrack and the imagery combine to create something very lovely indeed..

As Mad as Hell

I just love this…. I have it as a sample on a breaks track somewhere and now I know it’s a speech by Howard Beal (played by Peter Finch) from the 1976 film Network.

This style of animation is known as Kinetic Typography, and Aaron Leming has done a fine job with this effort…

As an aside, the words and overall sentiment are alarmingly relevant to todays economic climate wouldn’t you say?