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Recently, Chris Mckinlay (the other half of 1998) moved into a soon-to-be-destroyed house on Knight Street. He and his roommate James have fixed the place up quite nicely since they moved in, but you should have seen the place when they first got it. This should give you some perspective: I believe the only rule that his landlord gave them was, “No growing or selling drugs. Other than that, I don’t care what you do”. So Chris took that very seriously and we went to town thinking of some fun things we could do in his house. The first idea we had was to paint all over the walls. We thought it’d be fun to do a big mural in his kitchen. So I designed a mural idea (giant blades of grass and their root systems) and Chris and I just kind of went for it. I drew on the wall in pencil and then we painted it. We also thought it’d be fun if we did a time-lapse of us making the mural. Over the course of 4 days we planned and executed the project for your viewing pleasure:
and once the mural was finished, we had a party:
Stick around to see what else we do to Chris’ house in the near future.
-Justin
1998creative was recently interviewed for the studio spotlight on vancouveranimation.ca! They talked to them about the 10 commandments shorts and the future. Click on the link above to read the interview. Congrats you guys!
We’re very happy with our gorgeous new site. It’s basically a video asset presentation device, so we wanted to make it as fast, uncluttered and easy to navigate as possible while still communicating that we’re a sophisticated but friendly design shop. The design and palette are pretty neutral, with all the color and fanciness left to the clips. That’s why we went with two shades of light gray for backgrounds: it sets off the images without distracting. The site is all about showing off our lovely work. The headline font is called Gotham Rounded, part of a great font family by Hoefler & Frere-Jones. We’re using another one in that family – Gotham Narrow – for our print communication. It’s a little friendlier and less ubiquitous than Helvetica, but still informational, reminiscent of clear signage. For the body copy on the site, though, we’re using Verdana (for typical reasons – it looks consistent through most browsers and OSs, it’s plain and legible at small point sizes, generated text is faster and simpler than images-made-for-the-sake-of-font-consistency, custom font display generation is still a bit too wonky to count on). The whole site is populated from an optimized back-end database, which makes page-loading and searching quite fast. Main pages for each category of “our work” sell all of our disciplines in self contained sections: commercials, series, interactive, films, stuff. Randomly generated montages on the main page feature the best of all our disciplines. There’s a show-reel creation system built in, so users can join and log in to save favorite clips, organize, label and share them using convenient hover-over controls. Once logged in, users can view all clips organized by director, client or title, or simply search for clip sets. All client and director names are click-able sorting links to view more in the saem category. As for improvements on our last site, overall it’s brighter and uncluttered. Thumbnails are larger. Clip information is pared down, and all in one area to make it much easier to read. The search function is much stronger, and placed front and centre. Improved thumbnail hover-overs include external links to “more info” and allow downloading, emailing, and sharing of clips via url link or video embed. Like so many sites now, there are links to our external social sites: blog, twitter, facebook and vimeo for access to more info outside the corporate site. We’ve streamlined showreel creation by removing unnecessary steps: right-click a thumbnail, add to “myreel,” click save, enter optional reel info/description then save.
Check out the new site here
Full Press release here
Today we’ have the third short in The Ten Commandments series, number 7: Thou Shalt Not Steal. This one was a bit of a challenge. Banana’s aren’t exactly easy to animate. They don’t stand up. Who knew? But the sets were a lot of fun to make and we had a great time shooting this one. We hope you enjoy it:
More commandments shorts are in the works. We’re 3 down with 7 more to go!
-Justin
Global Mechanic’s own Brent Bouchard brings us a series of really really short films that take place in a doctor’s office. The timing on these is really great. I’m fond of the horse one myself. Take a look at the first 3 shorts in the series:
EPISODE 01
EPISODE 02
EPISODE 03
To see more of these shorts and some of Brent’s other work, visit his youtube page here or visit his vimeo page here (whichever you prefer). Be sure to check out his blog too.
-Justin
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