Visualising the Green Knowledge Trust

The latest development work through is from Cassiano Prado, Mario Sader and Ralph Piner. This three man team is realising the section which describes the Green Knowledge Trust; "A 'How-to' guide for developing low carbon societies". The team is working with the concept of how Dynamos use magnetic fields to convert mechanical rotation into a pulsing direct electric current. It's an analogy for how pairing reliable information with practical focus could create a green movement all by itself. The guys are taking quite a photo-realistic 3D approach to their section and Ralph's renders here show an amazing start...

A year ago today

I was clearing out our messy room in the flat over the week-end, when I came across a newspaper stuffed under a pile of used wrapping paper that Emma had 'salvaged' (She's a hoarder is Emma). I instantly remembered why I'd kept the paper; It's a Guardian that leads with an article that took me aback when I read the headline, "People power vital to climate deal - minister". Ed Miliband, our environment secretary was the guy behind the quote. If you read the article you'll see that he sites movements such as the suffragettes and the movements of the 60s counter-culture as key moments of 'people power' in the past. He mentions how we need movements like this to leverage government.

So i re-read the article and then checked the date; it was almost exactly a year ago that this article was published. Now at the time, Tim and I were around 5 months into developing our polemic for 'Coalition' and i remember feeling on reading the article
how we were now in-step with emerging thinking. I also remember wondering if our idea had 'missed the boat'. But looking back, I think Ed Miliband's thinking was flawed in one vital area, and as a politician it had to be:

I don't think the people's role is to leverage government on climate change. This time i don't think our role is to march in the streets, or to sign-petitions, or to bang pots together, or to call for our leaders to change and to lead the way. Our role is simply to do what what web 2.0 technologies now allow us to do, to collaborate and to swarm.

We need to create places where everyone can go to find out how they can green up, easily and efficiently. We need instant and reliable knowledge about which is the green product to buy (And just watch those who don't supply them products go bust). We need to re-discover community and build solutions together, micro economies are where it's going to be at. We need online places we can go to chip our good ideas in to problems and create solutions that will benefit us all. We need each other.

Governments are paranoid about being out of step with their public, it's their nightmare. This time the popular movement could go way beyond forcing the hand of government, governments will have to put on their running shoes to keep up.

Bear this in mind whilst hanging on every syndicated news snippet that comes your way from the Copenhagen conference. I don't mean be complacent, but what i do mean is that with the right application of the right tools by the right people, we could trigger a new era of global collaborative culture, never mind the cards the dealers in Copenhagen lay on the table.

Capitalism off guard - latest

Capitalism off guard - latest from Simon Robson on Vimeo.

Here's the latest version of 'Capitalism off guard'. Burnt match hands now pick up the little jumping characters, pull off their cork heads and their 'inner selves' spurt out and get bottled up for sale. All very symbolic don't you know...
The last sequence from spurts to bottle was all shot on the Clapham Rd multiplane, with tons of blue oil paint on the bottom plane for the background. The sequence took about 5 days to shoot, but it was worth it!
I'll start posting this sequence some time in the new year, doing a proper job on keying and adding backgrounds...More updates soon.

What's it all about?

Simon and I recently knocked together a one-paragraph precis for the film for promotional purposes. Thought I'd pass it round as a way of reminding everyone what it is we're all contributing to.

'Coalition of the Willing' proposes a new strategy for the war on global warming. This animated film explores how we could use new internet technologies to leverage the powers of activists, experts, and ordinary citizens in collaborative ventures addressing climate-related problems. The film outlines a model of a web 2.0 network consisting of three sites, each targeting a different audience (activists, experts, and ordinary citizens). Through simple analyses of open source culture, swarm activity, and social revolution, 'Coalition of the Willing' makes a compelling case for the effectiveness of this network. It offers a response to a major problem of our time: how to galvanize and enlist global publics in the fight against global warming.

First past the post

World Leaders - Clichéd 60s complete from Simon Robson on Vimeo.

It is with great pleasure that i announce the first section to be completed by one of the collaborating artists for Coalition of The Willing. World Leaders have completed this brilliant section for what is in effect the beginning of episode 2 of the film (Although the film won't be split into episodes...). Their piece romps through idealised memories of what the 60s was all about. Using a cool colour palette that rapidly transforms into bright colours, our 'dude' tunes in, drops out and escapes his rigid contemporaries. We then fall through a montage of objects depicting clichés the 60s are most remembered for. We finally end up watching blissed out hipsters floating away from consumerist landscapes in hot air balloons. Phew!

I started developing ideas with Ben & Mike for this section back in the early Summer of this year after they saw Tim & I at F5. They have been an absolute pleasure to work with. I'm kind of sad it's all over...sniff sniff.

As you'll see the piece is as yet without VO or sound design. Echolab will soon be onto the sound design and score, VO artist for the film TBC.

full up

I'm pleased and stoked and generally chuffed to introduce the last of our prodigious collaborators on Coalition. In no particular order there's German wunderkind Mate Steinforth, UK animation powerhouse Foreign Office, a unit i've long been a fan of Adam Gault & Stefanie Augustine, New kids on the block Yum Yum, My old mate super-animator Andy Hague (Who'll be working with Dylan White), brilliant Brazilian moving-image artist Thiago Maia and finally the combined talent of Mario Sader and Ralph Pinel who'll be working with Cassiano Prado. So that should be it folks, the film making collaborators are complete!

The Multiplane - It Lives!

After, much blood, sweat, toil and measuring things the Clapham Rd multiplane is alive and in action. After spending far more than they previously envisaged (Was there any envisaging??) our baby was brought into the world about a week ago. Thanks to the precision and ingenuity of Matt Day, the ferocious work pace of Max Halstead and the general standing around looking useless of Me, we got the thing finished. Matt even worked through a bout of what we strongly suspect was swine flue...easy.

I'm now shooting the final part of 'Capitalism off guard' on the contraption and it's working a treat. Version 2 upgrades are already being devised, to make the raising and lowering of the panes a bit easier and to give it a wicked paint job innit!

Once again thanks so much to the phenomenon which is Clapham Rd Studios!

multiplane and matchstick hands

Max looks happy, his multiplane is coming on a treat. Hope fully we'll have the glass planes fitted in a week or so and then the games can begin. The guys at Clapham rd have invented a system whereby the glass planes will be mounted on runners, so glass planes can be pulled in and out of the rig. This will be enormously useful for clean-up, especially during paint on glass sequences. The multiplane will also make using several colours during paint on glass sequences much easier to do. Simply put, whenever an object contains more than one colour, colours will be separated out onto different glass planes. No more muddy colours or pain in the arse clean ups! Hurrah!

If you've seen my work in progress on the 'capitalism off guard' sequence, you'll see that at the moment it ends with a bunch of characters hurdling coins. This bit of the action will co-incide with the VO saying, "How to sell to a generation impervious to consuerism". The VO will then continue, "The answer was to tap into the movement and sell to the individual in everybody." So, what happens next? Well, firstly our hurdling heros will each be picked up by a hand which will pull off their cork heads. I had a think about how to illustrate these hands and came up with the idea of hands made of burnt matches. The burnt matches represent marketing and advertising; spent forces devoid of any new ideas. These matches pull the heads off the vibrant youth and nick their innards, appropriating new ideas and vitality for their own ends...I'll shut up now.

Bergson and creative process

Imagination (def).

1. The act of imagining.
2. The mental consideration of acts or events not yet in existence.

I've been reading Henri Bergson lately. Bergson was a major philosopher and professor at the College de France at the start of the 20th century. He had a theory of 'creative evolution' and 'virtual multiplicities', debated Einstein on relativity and influenced everyone from Picasso to Sartre. Legend has it that when he spoke at Columbia University in New York, there was a traffic jam on Broadway - the first in history.

The thing I like about Bergson is his line on creative thinking. Creative thinking, for Bergson, is a mix of intuition, imagination, and vital impulse. We think creatively through processes of creative evolution. The creative experience is an experience of 'duration' -- we find ourselves suspended in a virtual multiplicity, a network of tasks and challenges, dealing with a project in all its aspects (sound familiar?). Bergson claims that, for the most part, 'we have acquired the useful habit of substituting for true duration an homogeneous and independent Time'. But to understand something (such as a project), we must stop thinking about it as an extended task occupying a certain chunk of Time, and enter into it to know how it persists and endures, its patterns of duration.

Bergson's philosophy is interesting for the light that it shines on the project we are working on together, 'Coalition of the Willing'.

What if we saw 'Coalition of the Willing' as a virtual multiplicity? What if it were not just a sequence of bold statements on the politics of global warming, nor even a series of sequences, brilliantly crafted and rendered by artists and studios from about the world, composed to make an inspiring point about the possibilities for open collaboration today? What if, together, the sequences formed a network of intensities or experiences, each triggering its own set of resonances, buzzing and combining with the others to create strange and unforeseen effects? It is a film that we're working on, but it is more than a film. Ideally, it should be an experience that lingers, that is more than the sum of its parts. As the animation progresses, I'm looking forward to stringing sequences together and getting feel for the resonances and tensions that the juxtaposition of images and ideas throws up.

I think we're nearing a threshold of 'creative evolution' on the film. We're about to see it morph into another beast entirely.

Simon realized before I did that it was vital to the concept of this film that the film itself express the artistic and collaborative processes that have gone into it. The film should exemplify and express, to the extent possible, the 'open source' ideal that is expressed in the polemic. Looking back, I am certain that the ethos with which we approached this film is a vital part of the ontology, or reality, of the project. I think in future posts I'd like to reflect on the ethos of this project, and in particular what I have learned from Simon about open collaboration.

Aviation promises to slash its carbon output!

News hot off the interweb at The Guardian today about the aviation industry promising to slash it's emissions to 50% of its 2005 emissions by 2050. Sounds fantabulous, until you wonder if they have an real idea of how they're going to do this. There's talk of an R&D race, so are they basing their reduction assessment on the emergence of technologies that don't yet exist? As KentGuy puts it in the comments section: 'Excellent idea, unclutterd by any method of achieving the aim. In the same spirit, I'm going to get 50% thinner by tomorrow afternoon.'

Perhaps we shouldn't be so cynical, I hope and pray their claims have some basis in fact.

The Clapham Road Multiplane

Down at Clapham Road Studios in South London we're building a multiplane! It's been designed especially to work with a 24mm lens and the size of the sheets of glass are the same aspect ratio as the DSLR chip. It will have 4 height adjustable glass planes measuring 66 x 100cms and we'll be using it predominantly with under-lighting. I'm terrifically excited to use it for the next shots on the film!



This is Max. Max is the don at making stuff and problem solving.

New Collaborators

I'm happy to announce that I've started developing sections of the film some fantastic new collaborators. There's Ryan Rothermel, other wise known as Decoy, Cassiano Prado, Dylan White, Bran Dougherty-Johnson and Dave Baum. I'll post work in progress from these collaborations as it develops.

Coalition on the web

The Coalition of The Willing website will be the public face of the film. We certainly envisage a film festival run once the film is complete, but really a film such as ours, discussing the potential of internet based collaboration must have it's primary place of residence on the web.

We see the site as being much more than just a vehicle for hosting the film. Firstly there's our idea of a 'staggered' online release. What we're going to do here is start off by publishing just the written argument (the voice-over script of the film) on the website. Then we will have several release 'waves' where a number of the sections of the film will be posted each time. Essentially, each 'wave' will flesh out the written polemic, adding moving image to the written words. We foresee the first such 'wave' of uploads being around the end of November.

Secondly, there's the idea of having the film site as a hub of activity and discussion on the issues thrown up by the film. We're going to post articles by Tim and other invited authors that elaborate on areas the film discusses. Also, we want to encourage the audience to post their own thoughts and feelings and respond to our film and the arguments of the 'invited' articles. We want to develop a way of visually tying in user generated content with the animated sections the film. After all once a film is made, its message is locked in time, it doesn't evlove, but the world and the debate evolves and moves on every day. In as much a site like this will help keep the debate current and alive.

We are now collaborating with creative web developer Tim Dillon who is taking the helm and leading us through the online minefield. We are also in talks with ace Flash developer Dermot Glennon from Toronto, who will hopefully be working on some of the Flash based aspects of the site.

World Leaders

After F5 I got a mail from Ben Stein from World Leaders saying that he was interested in Coalition of The Willing and that he'd like to get World Leaders involved. I checked out their work and loved their 2D celframe approach, especially the home darkly humourous stuff.

A couple of months later, I was working up ideas for the 'remembered Sixties' section at the beginning of episode 2, and realised that it would be cool to really send this section up. Why not show a groovy hipster cavorting through a psychedelic environment, blowing away the social values of his parent's world. I immediately thought of World Leaders.



I got on the phone with Ben and Mike and we bashed the ideas around a bit, Milton Glaser turned out to be a mutual influence. Soon enough Mike ran up some amazing keyframes that i fell in love with.



The World Leaders are already into animatic stage and are looking at a November completion date, most probably in time for the first wave of online releases.

cliched sixties animatic from Simon Robson on Vimeo.

Capitalism off guard

Capitalism off guard from Simon Robson on Vimeo.

Having been animating under camera for a while now, I've developed a few techniques which I'm starting to combine.

The first line in the voice-over for this section says, 'The sixties took capitalism completely off guard'. After a bit of toing and froing I came up with the idea of '60s' turning into a pair of scissors. This pair of scissors would then snip off a ball from a 'Newton's cradle' on an office desk, spoiling the party somewhat. This idea is partly shown in the work in progress clip below. The '60s' turning into scissors will be added at the front of the shot later.

I decided that I wanted to make the office from paper cut out layers and have the desk as real wood on which I'd place the different layers of paper. This way the shapes of the office made in paper would frame the desk, you'll see what i mean. I also decided that the office details should be line art, but not laid over in computer (I'm increasingly moving away from any 'look' a computer can spit out). So I made the office in Cinema 4D, created the line-art in the 'Sketch and Toon' non-photo realistic renderer and then printed each line art frame onto acetate. I then layered this acetate over the paper and wood. In case you dont know, acetate sheets are expensive and also an environmental abberation, so I only bought a pack of 25, but i needed to print out 90 frames. This meant I had to print on the wrong side of the acetate sheets (The side that doesnt dry) and clean off the ink so I could re-use them. This is why the animation starts to look messy.



People have asked why I've gone through such a laborious process to make something that could be made in a fraction of time in computer. I wouldnt dispute that doing everything in computer could have decimated the time spent, and a similar look could have been achieved. But I'm moving increasingly towards process orientated work. I dont get a 'look' in my head and try and create this, I think of a process that I'd like to try and then the look is almost arbitrary. It's a move away from work processes influenced by commercial pressures. Commercial work demands that you demonstrate a look to the client, get the thumbs up and then go off and execute it. This process, I feel, is terribly constrained, there is little room for discovery or the joy of happy accidents. In what I'm doing here I'm free to create whatever happens. After all, I'm only selling ideas.

Loyalkaspar

I met Elliot Chaffer from Loyalkaspar at F5. He told me about how at Loyalkaspar they use their Thursday evenings for their 'Betterment Bureau', I even got a badge! The BB is all about the guys at Loyalkaspar using some of their time to work on ideologically driven ethical projects that dont necessarily have a budget. So Coalition Of The Willing fits right in.

Like myself the guys at Loyalkaspar wanted to dive into stop motion, and I had an idea for one of the sections that i thought could work well for them. Have a look at the boards:


Elliot and his team really took to the idea and brought a 'fruit & veg' approach to the animation. In essence they want elements and characters to be made out of natural materials to kind of bind in with the ecological drive of the film. The faces are being made out of different vegetables, the earth will be a melon and the ice cubes are being made out of....plastic cigarette pack wrappers! Now I know the latter isn't made of organic matter, but i reckon it's a stroke of genius to use said fag pack wrappers in the clip. After all, to give these most wretched objects a second life in a 'green' animation is rather poetic if you ask me. And, despite my initial reservations, when manipulated they do look just like ice cubes!





The Betterment Bureau team have been playing around with different veggies and effects that you get as they age. I've been quite taken aback by the energy they've thrown into the process. They're also put together a couple of camera tests showing how they might pull the tea towel together and how the characters might look against some backgrounds. It's all progressing brilliantly.

Loyalkaspar - open source faces test from Simon Robson on Vimeo.

Parasol Island

After my talk at F5 the first guys I spoke to were Charles and Christian from Parasol Island. It was all a bit of a blur and we didn't stay chatting for ages, but I was excited to make contact with these guys, knowing their work so well. On my return to England I dug out their business cards, got in touch and we got cracking.

I asked the guys at Parasol Island if they had anything they'd been developing stylistically that they would like to bring to the film. They sent me this:




I loved the main character and thought the style could be a really good fit for the part of the polemic that explains 'open source' software development :
"The term ‘open source’ refers to a software development strategy in which the software source code is made available to a community, so that everyone can make changes and improvements. An example of the success of this strategy is the globally established computer operating system LINUX, which was created, and is constantly updated, by contributions from all over the world."
. I took their character and imagined him and his comrades in a virtual world where open source avatars build, paint and re-model virtual creations. Take a look at the storyboards:





Parasol then got back with a full on treatment and keyframes moving on from the storyboards i generated. They also developed a whole bunch of new ideas, like adding various different characters and making the balloons themselves spell out Linux.

Counter Culture Swarm

Counter Culture Swarm from Simon Robson on Vimeo.

This shot illustrates the part of the film that talks about how the counter culture movement of the late 1960s was the result of a swarm of people with aligned goals acting together. I immediately had the idea of taking various footage clips from the counter culture and showing these being assembled out of many small constituent parts.

I knew this would be a 3D particles job, but I really didnt have the expertise to tackle it. In my Maya days I started getting into particles but fell over when it came to 'mel' scripting. So, i was put in touch with one Andreas Gebhardt by a friend of mine, Jon Saunders form Psyop. At the time Andreas was working at Psyop in R&D. I dont want to try and describe exactly what Andreas does, I'd fail miserably. Suffice it to say that as far as I understand it he's pushing the limits of 3D R&D in Xsi. Andreas took my rather shonky concept visual for the shot (See below) and turned it into something wonderful. And i never got chance to even buy him a beer when i was in NYC. But one day I will, oh yes...

Open Innovation centre

Open Innovation Centre from Simon Robson on Vimeo.

So, I'd finished the 'fish' paint on glass shot and still had my lightbox set up. My next task was to tackle the Open Innovation Centre shot. This section talks about people working together to solve problems, and it struck me that this should be a character animation piece. But I'm not a character animator per se. So i looked around the basement of Clapham Rd which was full of boxes containing various different nuts and bolts and so on. I grabbed a few and started playing with them on the lightbox. It struck me that these objects could be characters in their simplest form. So I set to work...

Gavin and I are still developing the sound design on this. It's going to be much more like the kind of foley you'd get in a Terry Gilliam Python animation. I'll post the new version when it's ready!

High Profile Online Destinations

High Profile Online destinations from Simon Robson on Vimeo

This shot champions the central idea of the film; that bespoke online destinations enabling people to exchange knowledge and ideas on climate change could launch the grassroots movement the war effort needs.

On the back of a conversation I had with a work colleague I thought I'd give paint on glass a shot. I did a few online searches and found this site: http://www.awn.com/mag/issue3.2/3.2pages/3.2student.html In the article Wendy Tilby talks about using gouache paint mixed with glycerin liquid. It took me a while to get the consistency right, but it works a treat. Paint on glass is laborious and tricky, but I find it quite theraputic and the results are worth it.

For this shot the guys at Clapham Rd set me up with under lighting and a white perspex sheet with glass over the top.

Basically I've fallen in love with paint on glass animation, despite the fact that it's a painstaking process. I'm pretty sure that, combined with other media, it's going to be a staple of my work from now on...

Over The Counter Culture

Over The Counter Culture from Simon Robson on Vimeo.

This is the first sequence I approached for the film. The idea was about showing a guy literally transformed into the object of his desires. I wanted to shoot this under camera and come up with a bunch of different materials from which to create his face; Cumin, seeds, rubber washers and soldering wire all found their place here. With this shot I also started my love affair (Or nightmare) with creating animation from different layers of coloured paper.



I developed a system (Which I've used all the way through my animation process) where I pre-animate a sequence in computer and then use it as a guide layer in Dragon stop-motion software. This guide layer mixes with what's being seen through my live-view card in my Canon 450D, usually mounted rostrum style over my animation desk. Hey presto, I'm my own organic renderer!



Being super excited by this process I decided I wanted to swap from flat layers to three dimensional objects half-way through the shot, why not!? So the next shot shows the man's car in the form of a simple balsa wood model hurtling down the road overtaking other balsa wood models. Having to lug a huge track down the stairs into Clapham Road basement hammered home the difference between making a tracking camera in software and real life. Interesting wake up call!


I enlisted the help of James Wignall, aka Mutant Hands to design and animate the man as he walks down the street and spots the car he loves at the beginning of the scene. James did a stand-up job. He's now repped by Studio AKA, one of the best animation houses around. Easy to see why...


My mate Jonny Plummer jumped in to create the amazing cash till / tank sequence at the end of the scene. Jonny worked with storyboards I developed and took things so much further. Jonny rocks!

F5

F5: Simon Robson and Tim Rayner from F5 on Vimeo

At the end of April 2009, Tim and I spoke at the F5 conference in New York. We were invited to speak by Justin Cone, director of the conference. The stage provided a perfect venue for us to talk about Coalition of The Willing.

To be honest Tim and I were seriously worried about the event. We were talking at an event full of 'big hitters' and were scheduled to speak after Rachael Maddow and before Charlie White! So we put tons of work into prepping our speech and practiced probably like 8 times. In the end it went really well and F5 proved to be the venue where we met many of our now collaborators! It's a long talk running at around 45 mins, but hopefully worth a watch...

Echolab (Gavin Little)

Echolab (Gavin Little) and I met at the end of 2008 after I'd first returned to London from Sydney. I was introduced to Gavin by Johnny Kelly, a fellow Nexus director. I checked out all Gavin's audio work and was immediately impressed. Gavin and I then spent a few months trying to define the direction for the sound design for 'Coalition'. We established an approach based on manipulating organic sounds which was a little outside Gavin's comfort zone, but he completely threw himself into the challenge. You can hear the results on the work in progress clips of mine that I'll be uploading. Gavin worked hard to get sections ready for the F5 conference in April. He will be creating sound design for the whole of Coalition Of The Willing.

Tim Rayner

I met Tim in Sydney in the Summer (Or Winter if you're in the southern hemisphere) of 2008. My wife (Then girlfriend) attended his evening course at Sydney University entitled 'Philosophy For Change'. After she'd raved about the course and the tutor for 6 months I thought it was time to get in touch.

Tim and I immediately hit it off. We both realised we wanted to say something about the state of the world and our seemingly inevitable decline into climate catastrophe, but we weren't sure quite what. Through many brainstorming sessions in the bars of Sydney and later after my return to London, over Skype, we hatched a plan. In a nutshell, Tim gradually filtered my 'angry man' rantings on the state of things, added his knowledge on swarms and the possibility of open source and web 2.0 collaboration, and formulated the proactive and optimistic polemic which is 'Coalition Of The Willing'. It took me a while to get my head round his polemic, after all its easier to criticise and point fingers then it is to stick your neck out and make a proactive suggestion. I must admit, i still feel 'exposed' by the argument that Tim formulated and that we are all 'animating' to. I fear criticism, people saying 'you must be joking, web 2.0 saving the world...come on!' But I deal with these fears by reminding myself that what we propose in the film is not the final solution, rather it is a suggestion, it is iterative. My brother-in-law is an engineer with an engineer's mind. When i told him i was thinking of buying a Honda Prius he couldn't wait to tell me what a complete environmental aberration the Prius battery is. But my point to him was the same, namely that the Prius is not the final solution, it is an iteration, a step along the way.

I am proud to have been working with Tim. As first writer he has created an argument I am happy to stand behind. Tim has just completed his manuscript for Philosophy For Change, is working on a new book, continues to teach in Sydney and lives much closer to the waves than I do. Take a look at his blog: http://philosophyforchange.wordpress.com/