Christmas Project Take 2

I'm a complete sucker for music and good music videos so when I saw Shynola on Jared's email list I clicked and was pleasantly surprised. For starters, Shynola isn't one person, it is a group of four visual artists from London who collaborate on music videos and other such projects. They also don't just stick to one medium and specialise in both 2D and 3D. The first video by them I found was 2D and created in flash (unless I'm mistaken.. if not flash then a similar program).


Strange, for sure, but since I want to become better at using flash I can learn a lot from the techniques they used.

Next I followed an adjoining link to another music video he directed by U.N.K.L.E. called 'An Eye for An Eye' which was weird to say the least..

but the use of camera moves and the 3D animation was awesome. Especially how everything tied in to the music and the designs of the creatures.

Finally, as I was researching Shynola using search engines I discovered they had completed a music video for one of my favourite bands - Coldplay. I had little trouble finding the animation on youtube.


I can only place the trailer for the video here as embedding was forbidden on the actual video, but here's a link to it; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYtk1Z0UUu
Anyway, it showed that they were also adapt in stop-motion animation, and combined it efficiently with 2D and in some places 3D... animation and coldplay, what a great combo :D

Looking at their work, it really makes me want to create music videos of my own, and perhaps I will over the next few weeks that I have off and beyond. There is little I can find that I dislike about Shynola, except maybe some of the concepts in their work to do with more carnal pleasures.. (I guess I'm still a bit of a child at heart, but I really don't like sex scenes and the like. It's not just Shynola but I'm using their video as an example here).

Anyway, mostly great stuff.

Christmas Project

I've always felt that backgrounds where a weakness of mine when it came to drawing, and especially with regards to perspective, which is why for Jared's project I've started by researching Piranesi, an Italian etcher, archaeologist and architect (4 October 1720 – 9 November 1778).



There is so much detail in his sketches that you really get a feel for the place he is drawing, the atmosphere. It's also interesting to me because most of his work is set around the 1740s and so is quite different from the environments we are used to seeing today. Seeing his images makes me want to attempt a picture set in a different time period so that I can experiment at drawing different types of buildings and clothes so that I have a wider range to choose from in my head.

The only problem I find with his work is that because they are etchings there is no colour to them, and seeing the colour palette used by different artists helps me broaden my own range.



Over the next few weeks I have made it a goal of mine to experiment in other artists styles more, if I successfully manage to achieve something similar to Piranesi's style I will post it in another entry.

If you have trouble viewing any of the images, click on them to go to the original site they are linked from.