AIGA San Francisco continues its series of evening events that focus on interactive design topics. Intended for designers with beginning to intermediate experience with designing and building for the web, tablet and mobile environments, each event will give you the chance to learn from local experts as well as share your own knowledge with other attendees.

The sessions will be a combination of lecture, discussion, and workshop activities, so bring your sketch pads and thinking caps.

What are the essential principles of solid motion design? In what ways can motion be used to enhance storytelling or sell an idea? Where do transitions come into play? How can you bring your own designs to life? Where to start?

Join Justin Katz as he discusses best practices that drive effective motion design – the basics and BEYOND! Justin will cover conception to completion so that you can be prepared when working with motion and motion designers. He’ll take you through how he plans an animation — from scripting, thumbnails, storyboarding, style frames, animatics, rough cuts, audio, animation, editing and color correction.

Get the kick start you need to experiment with the art form yourself. If you’re just getting into motion or even already have a working skill set, you don’t want to miss this inpiring event.

http://aigasf.org/events/2012/02/16/interactive_chats_motion_design

“Motion Plus Design” is a non-profit project which aims to create the first exhibition center dedicated to Motion Design in Paris, France. Students, professionals and anyone interested can discover artists, meet them and learn a thing or two. This centre will also provide an opportunity to promote artists in other design departments so the different graphic design worlds could cross.

“Motion design is already present in all parts of our lives. Yet, no place is dedicated to celebrating motion design. When we realised this, we came up with the idea of founding the world’s first Centre dedicated to the world of motion design.”

The video below has for goal promoting this interesting idea and takes a look at the growth of Motion Design throughout the century:

“Motion Plus Design” – the first exhibition center dedicated to Motion Design in Paris!
Posted by motionVFX Team
January 30, 2012, at 10:54 PM

“Motion Plus Design” is a non-profit project which aims to create the first exhibition center dedicated to Motion Design in Paris, France. Students, professionals and anyone interested can discover artists, meet them and learn a thing or two. This centre will also provide an opportunity to promote artists in other design departments so the different graphic design worlds could cross.

“Motion design is already present in all parts of our lives. Yet, no place is dedicated to celebrating motion design. When we realised this, we came up with the idea of founding the world’s first Centre dedicated to the world of motion design.”

The video below has for goal promoting this interesting idea and takes a look at the growth of Motion Design throughout the century:

Every month the centre will welcome (infomation via official website):

either an artist [Kyle Cooper for example, the current American king of title sequences]
or a production company team [Post Panic or Psyop for ex.]
or a theme [for example 'the history of motion design from the 1920s to the present day']

The Centre will also house an area exclusively dedicated to the showing of work by experimental artists, from photographers, video artists and / or interactive and / or typographical artists. The idea is to create interaction between two worlds: those who are interested in Motion Design will be surprised to discover the exhibition of the work of a photographer, and those who will come to look at the work of a typographer will discover Motion Design.

Source: http://motion-plus-design.com

Find the common element among these things: Psycho; United Airlines; Quaker Oats; Dixie Cups; Goodfellas; the Girls Scouts of America. I picked a grab bag, and I could have included a lot more, to show how diverse the work of Saul Bass was; he did graphics, and more, for all of them. There is no bigger name in graphic design than Saul Bass, and now there is a gorgeous book, huge and colorful as befits his career, Saul Bass: A Life in Film and Design (Lawrence King Publishing) by his daughter Jennifer Bass, herself a graphic designer, and Pat Kirkham, who teaches decorative arts and design history. Flip through the 400 big pages here, and you are bound to find logos, posters, and movie title sequences you have seen many times; Bass’s range and influence were astonishing. There is a bit of biography here, along with a relatively chronological summary of his work from his poster for his high school’s open house through the poster for Schindler’s List. The text is worth reading, and the authors have quoted generously from Bass’s own thoughts on his life, work, methods, and output. As befits Bass’s legacy, however, this is a picture book, and it is a treat for the eyes.

Bass was born in the East Bronx in 1920, the child of Jewish immigrants. Late in life he recalled, “Some years ago I was asked, ‘When you were a kid what did you want to be when you grew up?’ Back then I thought the answer I gave was funny. I said, ‘Saul Bass.’ It was no joke.” He was Saul Bass early; besides excelling in art in high school, he painted signs for local fruit stalls and store windows. A scout for the Art Students League saw some of the signs, found out who made them, and offered Bass a scholarship. He took fine arts courses, but knew what sort of work he wanted to do. “The layout class had a fine-art content, but Saul was happy with the approach, realizing that to be any good at commercial art he had to learn such things as form, color, perspective, and composition.” His first job was for a small commercial art studio that designed trade ads for United Artists; it was just the work he wanted, although film ads in those days had none of the associations with glamour that was to come. “I had no idea anyone looked down upon advertising,” he said. “I looked up to it.” Still, he grew tired of following formulas and “cramming as much illustration, type and hype as you possibly could into ads.” When he took the next job as an art director, he specified that he would not work on movie ads.

Bass was introduced to the Bauhaus theorist György Kepes, who became his mentor and helped change Bass’s work into the strongly Modernist mode, paring away decoration and superfluities. Bass’s firm had trouble with its account for Warner Brothers, and despite his “no movies” stance, Bass was back working on films. In 1946 he realized he had to get out to Hollywood. Movies were changing, not only reflecting the social conditions of the postwar years, but also more films were being made by independent directors and producers. Title sequences of the movies were conventional letters over conventional backgrounds, and sometimes theaters ran the initial credits over the curtain as it went up. Bass thought a film began at the first frame and deserved a mood-setting overture. His title sequences are famous for setting the tone of the film, and are among the best ever made, from the swirling Lissajous patterns of Vertigo to the funny cartoons preceding It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.

Bass also did the credits for Psycho, and Hitchcock knew how important integrating Bass’s work into the film was. “Hitchcock involved Saul from the earliest stage. They had meetings before writing began, and Saul received each section of the screenplay as it was completed.” The result was a series of black and white bars on the screen, shifting as if you could almost figure out why, and revealing the words of the credits only when they came infrequently into perfect alignment. It was a signal of dysfunction and uncertainty. Not only did Bass do the titles, he was paid a good fee to “do something” with the shower murder scene, one of the most famous and frightening sequences in all cinema. Bass came up with storyboards that emphasized quick cutting to show a bloody murder in a stylized, frenzied fashion. Hitchcock was reluctant: “I showed it to Hitch. It was very un-Hitchcockian in character. He never used that kind of quick cutting; he loved the long shot.” Bass was even on the set and Hitchcock let him take charge of the filming of the sequence, but Hitchcock when interviewed by François Truffaut six years later was evasive about giving Bass credit.

Bass (and his wife Elaine, who gets much credit in this book for their joint efforts) had a “fade out” from making movie titles. He had a lot of corporate work to do, and was making his own documentaries and film essays (he also directed one feature film, Phase IV). He also found that directors were newly interested in using the title sequence themselves creatively, and perhaps this was a response to his own work. Nonetheless, he came back in the 1990s, working for among others Martin Scorsese (who writes the book’s forward), for whom he did the admirable credits for Goodfellas, Cape Fear, The Age of Innocence, and Casino. Quentin Tarantino gives an interesting analysis of this sort of work, saying that Bass was the greatest of title sequence makers. “I could never do what Scorsese does – give up control of the opening of my film to someone else, not even Saul Bass – I guess I should say Saul and Elaine Bass. I need to keep control of everything and Scorsese is too great a filmmaker not to know the importance of control. It can only mean one thing: Scorsese must have absolute, ab-so-lute, confidence in them. And that is nothing less than amazing to me.”

Among the most interesting pages here are the reproductions of preparatory sketches leading to a final product. Bass would do perhaps 300 sketches for a single simple logo. Shown here are his preparatory drawings for Otto Preminger’s Advise & Consent. The sketches include a Capitol dome with a wind up key, or a faceless congressman with a key in his back, or congressmen as puppets on strings. These are all good. The one Bass and Preminger agreed upon, however, was brilliant, showing the dome of the Capitol tilted open, as if the movie is going to “rip the lid off” the way politics is done. Some of the pictures here show Bass getting ready to make a presentation of his logo work to a particular corporation – there are hundreds of alternative designs on the walls. Bass was a master of the presentation of the final design to corporate clients; he liked being “on stage,” had excellent comedic timing and wit, and connected with each client individually. The presentation was the culmination of intensive work, starting with an analysis of what the company had done, its competitors, and its communication materials, and even enlisting market research. It is significant that Bass thought that one of the most interesting parts of his work was the interviews with one executive at a time. “I get to ask powerful and often interesting people about their work and their lives. It is in their heads that the real blueprint for the future exists or is being formed.”

Bass was devoted to progressive causes, and did plenty of pro bono work; there are designs here for the ACLU, the Special Olympics, Boys Clubs, YWCA, and more. Bass had a devoted family, and people who worked for his firm remembered a dynamic, funny, intense man who loved his job. When they split off to make their own firms, he gave them his blessing – it was part of the creative process, and he had done the same thing himself. To see the many designs in this book is to appreciate that while his work was too diverse to have any one unifying esthetic, it was characterized by simplicity, distillation, and minimalism, and was always forceful because it was so concentrated. Revealingly, he was anxious with every new assignment; he told young designers that “the only difference experience made, he believed, was the knowledge that since one had managed to come up with good ideas in the past, there was good reason to believe it would happen again.” He also said that considering present work is humbling “because no matter how much experience you have, the blank page is still terrifying.” Maybe so, but he conquered any such fears countless times, with successes reproduced here on page after page of memorable, effective images.

One Fine Day, the creative design/animation boutique led by Creative Directors Nathalie De La Gorce and Chris Haak – proved the old adage that “less is more” true with a new show open for the popular romantic comedy “Hart of Dixie” (seen Mondays on The CW Network). With great style, the open creatively distills the show’s essence into just ten eye-catching seconds.

“The piece was constructed as one continuous camera dolly and pan, with a combination of live action, still photography and CG elements all arranged in 3D,” Haak says. “We designed a 3D animated panoramic sky throughout to provide continuity and tie all of these disparate elements together.”

The open begins with street level shot of a pair of fashionable women’s shoes. The camera quickly pans straight up toward the city skyline as a bright sunburst gives way to a dolly-tracking shot past a “Welcome to Bluebell “ sign and toward an expansive country home. The open ends with a shot of the show’s star, Rachel Bilson, seated on a suitcase alongside a picture perfect lake, complete with a dock and gazebo off in the distance.

According to Haak, the opening shot of midtown New York was constructed by compositing several still photos into a panorama. All of the Bluebell elements were either rotoscoped from footage supplied by the client, or edited from still images.

Additionally, One Fine Day shot a number of HD motion elements of marsh grasses blowing in the wind to keep things from feeling too static, and to help transition between environments. For the final shot Bilson was filmed against a greenscreen in Los Angeles and composted into the scene.

“The CW Network was looking to capture the essence of this show, which tells the fish-out-of-water story of a young, New York City doctor who finds herself working in the small town Bluebell, Alabama,” Tom Bayer, One Fine Day Executive Producer, says.

For De La Gorce, the short running time meant many of these visual elements had to coexist on screen at the same time. Because of that one of the biggest challenges for the creative team was composing frames that would work well together.

“It was difficult to tell if elements would work together without seeing them composed with decent mattes and color corrections – we couldn’t just do a rough comp and to see how it looked,” De La Gorce says.  “We ended up doing a lot of perspective alteration or removal, not to mention color correction, to achieve the exact look we were after.”