OFFF Paris 2010 : Sponsors titles

Julien Vallée has once again created an original piece of art and this time he has done it for the ” OFFF Festival “.

Each year, The OFFF Festival asks one of their keynote speakers to create a video that present the major partners of the event. Julien had the honnor to create it for this issue of OFFF.

Expo Québec

Dans le cadre de l’édition 2010 d’Expo Québec, Frame a désigné 2 nouveaux personnages du nom de Plaisir et Découverte qui seront présents autant sur le web que sur les productions imprimées. Vous les retrouverez entre autre dans de courtes animations interactives conçues par l’agence Brad et produit par Frame.

RIFF

Montréal-based motion design/VFX facility Frame Studio recently completed “RIFF” – a 30-second spot for a special music exhibit at the Musée de la civilisation de Québec. The piece, produced via ad agency Bleublancrouge, traces the history of musical forms from hip hop through disco, rock & roll, jazz, and blues back to traditional African rhythms.

What made the project unique for Frame Studio was the idea of making the visuals respond to the rhythm of the accompanying music sound tracks.

“We had to illustrate each genre of music and represent them in an abstract way,” explained Frame Studio president and creative director Karl Rhainds. “Our starting point was the idea of a long shot of a universe of music where the viewer is zooming in closer and closer to the core, where African music is the heartbeat behind all of it.”

“We had created ‘mood boards,’ for each of the musical styles,” said Dominique Trudeau, creative director and VP at Montreal’s Bleublancrouge,”Frame did a lot of research and developed the image ideas further. Then we brought in the music, which provided the inspiration for animating the images. “

Visual effects artist Lucas Schumaker relied on the Espresso tools in Maxon’s Cinema 4D to link the properties of the CG animations directly to the frequencies of various instrument tracks in the audio. Using this suite of under-the-hood tools, Schumaker was able to let the music literally drive the animation. ”Espresso is a node-based system that lets you ‘plug and play’ any part of the software with any other part of the application so you can do things that aren’t programmed into the software itself,” explained Schumaker. “That meant I could take the frequency of the sound samples and plug them into any attribute of the animation I wanted, whether it be the intensity of the light, the colour fluctuations or scale positions.”

“We worked together on each step, with the client, and with Frame,” explained Trudeau, “We’re trying to create great things and it takes great partners whom you can trust to achieve that.”

Karl Rhainds agrees, “The main challenge when you’re creating an abstract piece like this is making sure that everybody in the creative team is on the same page. We’re grateful for the confidence which Bleublancrouge showed in us. It’s that trust that allows us to push the work further.”

The RIFF spot is airing on Québec television for “Riff – Quand l’Afrique fait vibrer les Amériques” at the Musée de la civilisation de Québec in Québec City. The exhibit runs from June 2, 2010-March 13, 2011.

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