Blurring the line between art and branding, bicoastal directing collective Brand New School teamed up with Adobe and Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, San Francisco, to create a Flash-driven interactive wall mural featuring imagery that is motion-activated by nearby viewers. The wall went live Monday in London’s Piccadilly Circus following an installation at the Virgin Megastore in Union Square, NYC.
As people walk by the 25’x10′ projection, layers of eye-popping graphics–triggered by the viewer’s movement–appear. The piece showcases Creative Suite 3’s library of effects, including Illustrator, Photoshop, After Effects, Flash, and other applications. It recently debuted at a launch party for CS3 that was held at Skylight, an 18,000 square foot gallery space located in the Soho district of Manhattan.
The murals are designed so that when a person walks from left to right, there’s an evolution from simplicity to complexity. As someone moves in that direction, more animations are triggered and the density of the imagery increases.
One interesting aspect of the project is that the advertising and the product are integrated: Brand New School used the product being sold to create the wall mural. “Each layer is inspired by the actual software,” said Jonathan Notaro, creative director/founder of Brand New School. “Something might look like it was made in Illustrator, and something else was a product of something you can do in Photoshop. This was an exploration in the aesthetics of what you can do in CS3. It’s a mixed media display that hits the different disciplines of image making and mixes all those things together in an intriguing way.”
Bicoastal Obscura Digital, along with Goodby and Adobe, developed the mural’s mechanism that tracks a person’s movement as they walk by. Studio For Interactive Media cofounder Justin Bakse, who acted as the action-based scripter, commented, “The mural knows to hone in on the person who is closest to it and disregard other information. The mechanism assigns people multiple layers of code that is used to create designs and put them in motion. The result is a dialogue between the person walking by and what’s happening on the projection screen.”
Does “Hundreds of Beavers” Reflect A New Path Forward In Cinema?
Hard as it may be to believe, changing the future of cinema was not on Mike Cheslik's mind when he was making "Hundreds of Beavers." Cheslik was in the Northwoods of Wisconsin with a crew of four, sometimes six, standing in snow and making his friend, Ryland Tews, fall down funny.
"When we were shooting, I kept thinking: It would be so stupid if this got mythologized," says Cheslik.
And yet, "Hundreds of Beavers" has accrued the stuff of, if not quite myth, then certainly lo-fi legend. Cheslik's film, made for just $150,000 and self-distributed in theaters, has managed to gnaw its way into a movie culture largely dominated by big-budget sequels.
"Hundreds of Beavers" is a wordless black-and-white bonanza of slapstick antics about a stranded 19th century applejack salesman (Tews) at war with a bevy of beavers, all of whom are played by actors in mascot costumes.
No one would call "Hundreds of Beavers" expensive looking, but it's far more inventive than much of what Hollywood produces. With some 1,500 effects shots Cheslik slaved over on his home computer, he crafted something like the human version of Donald Duck's snowball fight, and a low-budget heir to the waning tradition of Buster Keaton and "Naked Gun."
At a time when independent filmmaking is more challenged than ever, "Hundreds of Beavers" has, maybe, suggested a new path forward, albeit a particularly beaver-festooned path.
After no major distributor stepped forward, the filmmakers opted to launch the movie themselves, beginning with carnivalesque roadshow screenings. Since opening in January, "Hundreds of Beavers" has played in at least one theater every week of the year, though never more than 33 at once. (Blockbusters typically play in around 4,000 locations.)... Read More