Posts tagged animation

Good Books Metamorphasis

An incredible animation channeling Hunter S. Thompson to promote Good Books, an online bookseller that donates its profits to Oxfam.

Created by String Theory.

Where would we journalists be without our Moleskine notebooks? Frankly, I’m afraid to answer my own question.

Ira Glass on storytelling and harnessing creativity.

Illustrated by David Shiyang Liu.

Beer

Or, more appropriately, visualizing the American craft beer revival.

Perhaps inspiration for your weekend beverage of choice.

The Musical Roller Coaster

Via Virtual Republic:

Visualization of the 1st violin of the 2nd symphony, 4th movement by Ferdinand Ries in the shape of a roller coaster. The camera starts by showing a close-up of the score, then focuses on the notes of the first violin turning the staves into the winding rail tracks of the rollercoaster. The notes and bars were exactly synchronized with the progression in the animation so that the typical movements of a rollercoaster ride match the dramatic composition of the music.

Created for the Zurich Chamber Orchestra.

Run Time: 1:00

H/T: The Society Pages.

Tebow goes Biblical on Steelers, Shows up Haters

NMA.tv brings its magic to sports.

Today, in scary: The Masters of Media

In this animated short on media consolidation, Rogier Klomp explores the significance of six major media companies controlling three quarters of the world’s television networks.

TLDR: Viewers no longer have a remote control on reality, corporations do.

As more and more information reaches our brains through bright device screens, the motion graphic has become the pinacle of visual communication. Nathaniel Ruhlman, creative director and founder of Dorian Orange, says that motion graphics is the spot where art meets commerce, and the people who work in the industry today are the same artisans who would have created the cathedrals 500 years ago. As such, motion design will assume an ever-greater role in the communications hierarchy, one we’re only beginning to investigate.  

Animating StoryCorps

Founded in 2003, StoryCorps has recorded 30,000 interviews across the United States of (un)common American stories. It does this by letting people reserve time in their sound booths in New York and San Francisco, and in an additional roving sound booth that reaches other destinations across the country.

To date, some 60,000 people have participated with “best of” stories airing on NPR’s Morning Edition, and all preserved at the Library of Congress’ American Folklife Center. Consider it an original radio crowdsourcing project.

Lately, some of the interviews have been animated. The work is done by the Rauch Brothers Animation. You can follow them on Tumblr. 

Via This American Life:

The camera really changed the way we behaved.

It still really disturbs me. We lost our humanity.

We let one of our classmates just get trampled on.

And they weren’t even real cameras.

Propagation Animation of the Honshu Tsunami across the Pacific towards North and South America.

Via NOAA Center for Tsunami Research:

Propagation of the March 11, 2011 Honshu tsunami was computed with the NOAA forecast method using MOST model with the tsunami source inferred from DART® data. From the NOAA Center for Tsunami Research, located at NOAA PMEL in Seattle, WA

Another in a day of speechless.

See this animation? It’s made with a global life expectancy data set from the World bank that’s been imported into Google’s Public Data Explorer. 

Google’s been working on the Data Explorer ever since it acquired Gapminder and its Trendalyzer software. So far, visualizations like these have been created with Google’s in-house team. But not so anymore. They’ve released a Web interface for data journalists, academics and others with large data sets to upload their info and start visualizing.

Reports Nieman Lab:

[Benjamin] Yolken and Omar Benjelloun, Google Public Data’s tech lead, have written a new data format, the Dataset Publishing Language (DSPL), an XML-based format designed particularly to support animated visualizations. “DSPL is like those in the Public Data Explorer,” Benjelloun notes in a blog post announcing the opening. “We’ve been using DSPL internally to produce all of the datasets and visualizations in the product”; now, he writes, “you can now use it to upload and visualize your own DSPL-formatted datasets in your own applications.”

It’s an experimental feature that, like the Public Data Explorer itself — not to mention some of Google’s most fun features (Google Scribe, Google Body, Google Books’ Ngrams viewer, etc.) — lives under the Google Labs umbrella. And, importantly, it’s a feature, Yolken notes, that “allows users who may or may not have technical expertise to explore, visually, a number of public data sets.”

The newly open tool could be particularly useful for news organizations that would like to get into the dataviz game, but who don’t have the resources — of time, of talent, of money — to invest in proprietary systems. 

Good times.

The Huffington Post/Aol merger animated. All we can say is, zing! 

The Green Wave, an animated documentary about Iranian protests during and after the country’s 2009 election, premiered last night at the Sundance Film Festival.

Color us amazed by the innovation that went into its production.

Via the Guardian:

How do you show what it was like for the Iranian protesters arrested during the green revolution of 2009? That was the challenge facing Ali Samadi Ahadi when he was working on his documentary about the abortive uprising, The Green Wave. The answer? Get online. The Green Wave is based on first-person accounts collected from tweets, Facebook entries and blogs. It features footage of protests and public gatherings shot on cell phones. But after the government militia turned on protesters and hauled them away to jail, the documentary trail ran cold. That’s when Ahadi turned to animation.

To critics who say the film doesn’t bring new information to the table, Ahadi responds, “I don’t say we all have all aspects of this time in the film. I don’t say it is an objective view of the situation. It is a subjective, very personal view of the situation in Iran after the election.”