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Last week, CTV’s W5 streamed a documentary series about a place very near to our hearts: Fogo Island.
Spurred by a recent movement to revive geographically isolated regions of Newfoundland and Labrador, the documentary primarily follows the story of Zita Cobb. A businessperson-turned-philanthropist, Cobb cashed in her hard-earned dot-com stocks, returned to her birthplace of Fogo Island, and contributed six million dollars through the Shorefast Foundation (which she set up with her brother) to fund a regional revitalization project.
Cobb’s personal commitment has turned into an incredible movement – one that involves the efforts of organizations and individuals nationwide that also share in the hope of seeing the region brought back to life after decades of economic hardship.
Organizations like the NFB and the Fogo Island Arts Corporation have also partnered to finance the project (contributing 11 million dollars) in order to boost tourism and make the small townships on Fogo Island and [...]
This week, we bring you another installment of our retrospective blog series. This time, we’re talking vintage comics and pop art.
Ad for Smirnoff Ice by Global Mechanic. Animated in a combo of Flash, Cinema 4D and After Effects.
The Global Mechanic creative team is inspired by the old and new alike – we love mixing modern techniques and animation with retro styling.
A commercial we recently finished for Smirnoff (under the direction of our man, Chez,) is one such example.
Pop art, halftone patterns, flatness in 3D space… it’s all here.
The agency wanted a punchy ’60s comics look for Smirnoff Rocket. We worked on this in our Vancouver studio in collaboration with François-Marc Baillet in France, sending dots and bubbles back and forth across the ocean.
The graphics styles of Shepard Fairey (think: Obama’s HOPE poster) and even more notably, the vintage romance comics of Roy Lichtenstein, were a great creative inspiration [...]
Jimmy Rigger + XBox Kinect come together. (That's Philip, one of our animators, moving the smiling Mr. Jimmy)
We recently got a sweet 47″ 3D (flicker-free!) TV in our office, along with an XBox Kinect and a Playstation 3.But it’s not all for just fun and games. Sure, we went through some melee training and fought some gladiators in Medieval Moves, but it’s all part of the artistic process (really!)
You see, we’re about to start production for Impromptu, a 3D short that Global Mechanic is co-producing with the NFB. We posted some preliminary character sketches a while ago – stay tuned for more next week- to give you a sneak peek at what the movie is going to look like (you’ll notice Matisse and Javier Mariscal are a huge inspiration).
It’s funny though, ever since 3D made its way into our office on a more physical level, I’ve been noticing all [...]
The NFB's One Millionth Tower project gives life to ideas that could inspire positive change in urban communities.
The NFB has been collaborating with Pattison Onestop and Art4Commuters on a project that’s been turning heads (1.3 million to be exact) on subway platforms in Toronto all month. This is one of two installations that are part of NFB’s multi-year HIGHRISE project, a documentary experiment developed by Sharon Switzer, which is now being adapted into public art.
The web documentary that inspired all of this, aptly named “One Millionth Tower”, can be viewed in 59 stations across the subway network in a series of 30-second animated videos – but only until the end of February.
And if you’re not in Toronto, watch the full documentary, and discover how cinema, architecture, and the magic of HTML5 are re-imagining the urban landscape: Using the power of animation, One Millionth Tower transforms a deteriorated highrise neighbourhood into [...]
Japanese graffiti artist Shin Tanaka has been turning heads since 2005, when he chose a new canvas to create edgy paper toys. Culture Review recently checked in with Tanaka to see where his paper creations are taking him next.
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