BFI announced the Vision Awards of up to £2.8m across 20 film companies, whith Nexus receiving one of the top awards, with a vision for cultivating creative excellence and growing their businesses,

This is the first government development fund in over five years and was highly contested across the whole film industry.

Ben Roberts, Director of the BFI Film Fund, comments:

Each of the companies selected had a strong vision for the future growth of their business and we feel they’re poised to build their profile nationally and internationally, many of them by capitalising on their filmmaker relationships and creative instincts, coupled with an entrepreneurial flair. We think it’s an exciting and eclectic mix, and I’m really pleased we could support UK animation studios for the first time. This sizable investment in development will help to build the foundations of future growth and success for UK film.

The Awards

The purpose of the BFI Production Company Vision Award initiative is to help grow strong and sustainable UK film businesses, each company will receive a Vision Award of up to £200k over two years, with the financial and creative autonomy they need to develop an exciting slate of film projects, grow their business and bolster their company profile nationally and internationally.

Click here for the full list of companies and more information about the announcement.

Very exciting times ahead for the Nexus Studio

Kibwe, who won the special jury award at the festival in 2012 for his poignant animation Robots of Brixton will be represented for commercials globally by Nexus.

We have also struck a deal to work with Factory Fifteen, the animation and design collective founded by Kibwe alongside his partners Jonathan Gales and Paul Nicholls.

Factory Fifteen’s diverse backgrounds range from architecture, 3d visualisation, engineering, animation and photography. As a result their multi-disciplinary talents and distinctive approach to film making has been engaged by high profile brands including Samsung, Channel 4 and The British Film Institute.

Chris O’Reilly, Co-Founder, Nexus, says: “We are honoured to welcome Kibwe Tavares and Factory Fifteen to the Nexus stable. Kibwe has an unusual talent in being able to blend live-action performance with visionary CG and VFX work. And further we’re also delighted to work with Factory Fifteen and their talented design led moving image work. We see a bright future working with them together and separately on a broad range of projects from ambitious film and VFX projects to high-end design led moving image work”

YCN: What’s the best thing about being an animator?

Johnny Kelly: It’s a career my six-year-old self would approve of. I hope.

YCN: What was the best piece of advice you received when you began working professionally?

JK: Don’t be afraid to ask questions. A singularly dull answer I know, but if you are curious and plague your co-workers with questions you will learn a lot. You may also be fired for being irritating, but it is worth the risk.

YCN: Which project have you been especially proud of?

JK: Probably this video for NB Studio, made in collaboration with James Graham. It’s been a while since I’ve animated something this long myself, so I was worried I might have forgotten how. It was a great excuse to learn lots of new things – bits of Flash and some basic 3D animation. When you work with a designer you trust it helps a lot too. It was a barrel of fun making James’s drawings move.

YCN: How have you approached promoting yourself as an animator?

JK: When I was leaving college I sent my work out to as many magazines and blogs as I could – it’s a good opportunity to really put yourself out there. These days I’m lucky enough to be with a production company (Nexus) who do the heavy selling for me.

YCN: What’s the best thing you’ve ever won?

JK: When I was 15 I did a terrible drawing and won a trip abroad! I was sent to a crumbling sports camp outside Warsaw, Poland for a week. It was the craziest thing, all these kids from around the EU who had drawn a picture or written some poetry, and were rewarded with twelve-hour days of intense sports training. I broke some of my teeth on a trampoline and had to get a root canal when I got home. It was fun though.

YCN: What’s the most inspiring thing you’ve recently seen?

JK: In terms of work I’ve seen and wish I had done, this lovely new video by Joe Pelling and Becky Sloan. It made me particularly jealous, not least because I have a cycling puppet in a thing I just finished too! Becky and Joe are infuriatingly talented.

Johnny is one of 80 creative professionals kindly participating in the judging of this year’s YCN Professional Awards. Discover them all here.

Original Article on YCN

Click here to view the embedded video.

The App that allows people to control a rotating, stop-frame animated film on an abstract turntable. The app remixes the avant-garde looks of emerging Viennese fashion designers with touch gestures—by turning clockwise the disk speeds up, and by swiping anti-clockwise the movements and music slow down.

The remixed industrial, electronic beats of Austrian producer Callrider enhance the enigmatic atmosphere and playfulness of the app.

Made for the Microsoft Surface device, the Windows 8 version of the iPad, the app is also displayed as an art installation at The International Fashion Showcase: Another Austria exhibition taking place at the Austrian Cultural Forum during London Fashion Week. The exhibition celebrates contemporary creative work from the country’s emerging and established artists, which follow the Austrian artistic tradition of being on the forefront of modernity and uniqueness.

Looks by Austrian designers Anna Aichinger, Femme Maison, Gon, Hartman Nordenhols, Kayiko, Madame with a Mission, Mark and Julia, and Pitour are projected onto the wall in the installation showcasing the mix n’ match mechanisms of the app to better appreciate the aesthetic and style of their pieces.

Chris O’Shea, the artist and interaction designer, collaborated with Nexus Interactive Arts, to create ‘Woodland Wiggle’ – an innovative interactive installation at Europe’s newest hospital, The Royal London, which helps children benefit from the healing powers of art and play.

Click here to view the embedded video.

‘Woodland Wiggle’ is a pioneering interactive game displayed on a television the size of a room. It allows children to enter into a storybook illustrated world enabling them to paint; play music; and trigger sun, rain, snow and rainbows with animated animal characters across a number of woodland scenes.

Working in close consultation with clinical teams at the hospital, and following a series of workshops with physiotherapists and occupational therapists, O’Shea was able to determine the movements that would give children the best health benefits which strongly influenced the format and design of the games created.

O’Shea based the movements on suggestions made by the nurses, staff, and physiotherapists, incorporating a range of motions the staff use when they go on their rounds or as part of the workshops to keep the kids active. Things like spiraling arms for movement of the wind and trickle fingers in the air for rain, which are directly used in the piece. The challenge was in keeping the interaction simple yet engaging.

The Project was commissioned by Vital Arts, the arts organisation for Barts Health NHS Trust with funding from Transformers, funded by The National Lottery, the Olympic Lottery Distributor and managed by ELBA and has been receiving some amazing press:

The Creators Project
The Guardian
Creative Review
LBB Online
Evening Standard

Credits

Artist Chris O’Shea
Producer Beccy McCray
Executive Producer Luke Ritchie
Development Producer Claire Spencer Cook
Production Assistant Carmen de Witt
Illustrator and Animator Felix Massie
Composer and Sound Designer Brains and Hunch
Documentation Editor Dave Slade
Production Company Nexus Interactive Arts

Paint

Artem are a model-making company that specialise in astounding physical effects for films like X-Men and Tomb Raider, but also puppets like these. They made all the characters for ‘Back to the Start’ from scratch using a range of materials.

There is a crucial moment halfway through the film where we see the farmer up close, and I wanted him to look delicate and vulnerable. In order to feel explicitly handmade, Artem kindly painted things less perfectly than they usually would, using thick brush strokes.

Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene

We’re very lucky at Nexus in that we have a full-time 3D studio chock-full of animators. Mostly they are producing fancy high-end CGI animation for the likes of Honda, Coca-Cola or Intel, but sometimes if I’m lucky I am able to rope them into helping pre-visualise a shoot.

The technical director here, Mark Davies, created a very detailed animatic which allowed us to plan out the entire film in fine detail. Because he had already modeled the farmer character virtually, we were able to then pass this file over to Artem who printed his head on their 3D printer in ABS which is a type of plastic. This was then molded and cast so they could reproduce identical duplicates. I’m not very good at designing voluptuous ladies so wife has the exact same design, but with a bun on the back of her head.

Flocking

We used a huge amount of this stuff – flock – to create the grass texture you see throughout the film. It involves covering the tabletop surface with glue, and then sprinkling it on by hand just like the glass dust.
We didn’t want it to feel as evenly-coated as a train set landscape, so Graham mixed the flock with other materials (including paprika) to create worn patches here and there.

Iron

The puppets can’t stand up on their own because of their tiny legs. Gary Faulker is a professional model rigger, and created these iron counterweights specifically for the film.

These are all removed in post production. Lead can also be used but can be a tricky material to get a hold of in large quantities – recently I was looking for weights for a project and ended up having to go to a fishing shop in Croydon to buy sinkers.

K-Y Jelly

We needed to create a vat of growth hormonal fluid for one section of the film. Liquid is notoriously difficult to simulate with stop motion animation and I made this trickier by asking for bubbles to be floating in the fluid.

Graham used plastic balls for the bubbles, but to find a liquid with the right consistency to allow them to float was more of a challenge. He and his team tried hair gel, hand sanitiser and a few other options before hitting on KY Jelly at about 10pm on Friday night, just before we were due to shoot the sequence. Luckily the nearby 24hour Sainsburys was open and well stocked so he was able to bring back a basket-load.

Glass

The film is loosely structured around the four seasons, and because everything goes wrong in winter it was important that this part felt a little bleak. Having loose snow around isn’t great for stop motion animation (if things aren’t glued or screwed down they will invariably hop around from frame to frame), however our stellar production designer Graham Staughton and his team had the idea of glueing down glass dust.

This process is hazardous to say the least – a layer of PVA glue goes down, followed by repeated sprinkling of this fine dust. The guys wear masks for this – if you weren’t you could risk breathing in glass particles (not a good thing). The surface is then vacuumed to remove any loose crystals. On a slightly nerdy note, there was a lovely unexpected effect when the camera moved around these because each crystal catches and reflects the light in a different way.

 Article originally posted on D&AD.com

The Carp and the Seagull by Evan Boehm has been awarded the FWA cutting edge award.

http://www.thefwa.com/adobe/tcea/the-carp-and-the-seagull

In Partnership with Adobe, The Cutting Edge award is presented to the project that best highlights the newest capabilities of the modern web.

‘The Carp and the Seagull’ is an interactive short film about one man’s encounter with the spirit world and his fall from grace.
Experience The Carp and the Seagull for yourself

Comments from the judges on this winning project:

A deep and captivating interactive short film that takes you on a journey into another world. The experimental and progressive nature of this project shows us how storytelling can be combined with the next generation in technology to deliver a mind opening adventure.
ROB FORD, FWA FOUNDER

A poetic experience as we rarely see! Love it.
FRANCOIS PERRAULT, FWA JUDGE

Nice technological achievement!
GUILLAUME BRAUN, FWA JUDGE

I love this project, it is a perfect example of story telling and technology!
MAXIMILIANO CHANAN, FWA JUDGE

“In 2012, the top five campaign honorees are a telling snapshot of where you can find the best creativity today–everywhere.” – Campaign Magazine

Creativity have released their 2102 creativity report and Johnny Kelly’s Cannes Grand Prix winning film for Chipotle, Back to the Start, is their No: 1 campaign.

Click here to read more information and see a the case study film that shows the full campaign that the film was part of.

Televisual has released its Commercials 30 (Production Companies) and we are pleased to say that Nexus is in at No. 6, which is our best yet.

Johnny Kelly’s Cannes Grand Prix winning film for Chipotle, Back to the Start, was also 6th in the Best Commercials category.

Also, every commercials production company was asked to name the rival outfits they most respected and again we made the top ten and came in at No. 9, picking up votes for being “always innovative”.