Features | |
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Last Airbender |
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Grey's Anatomy Promo VFX |
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Interview with Bobby Chiu |
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License to dream |
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Focus : Gears Of War 3 |
News Headlines | |
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Dragon Age 2 |
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Bioshock Infinite |
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Time travellers Comic |
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Envirometer |
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Thelma and Louise Remake |
Other Features | |
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Interview With Nick Harris |
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Making Art for Ipad |
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Making VFX for Ben Hur Remake |
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Interview : Mike winkelmann |
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Baby Data |
CRUSH is a directorial collective and full-service production company specializing in concept, design, visual effects and post production. Recent work includes the award winning viral campaign for Douglas Coupland’s latest novel The Gum Thief and the two most recent music videos for R.E.M.; Hollow Man and Man-Sized Wreath, both singles from their new album ACCELERATE.
IT'S ART : What is Crush’s philosophy?
CRUSH : Crush started way back at the end of the last millennium as a way to give us somewhere really great to work. As motivations go, that’s not a bad one, but there’s more to it than that. In the dark ages, when extortionately expensive computers roamed the land, creativity happened before you got to a place like ours. All ideas had to be signed, sealed, and planned long in advance. Rooms had to be dark and sober. That just wasn’t going to work for us.
We believed then, as now, that creative people should be able to create. And because of that belief, our clients, our fellow travelers, come to us for all kinds of reasons. As a result, our work is as likely to be seen on a laptop or in the street as it is on TV.
If we were to define ourselves (something we concertedly try to avoid), we would say that we make pictures move. Where they go after is as varied as the pictures themselves. We conceptualize, direct, design, animate, execute, polish, master, compress, dub and ship. We use computers, pencils cameras and occasionally office supplies to make those pictures move. If you want to get down to the geek porn stuff, we have Inferno, Flame and Flint, we have Maya, we have After Effects, and an ECM Giotto espresso machine (to some people that matters more than the other stuff alright?).
We have friends and partners who we work with when we need to. We do pieces of things or we do everything from start to finish. Sometimes you want to drive, sometimes you just want to get there. We understand that. Service is at the core of what we do, so we’re happy to offer as much or as little as people need. We can work with finished pictures, a detailed overall strategy, a scribble on a napkin, or the magic phrase “what would you do if…”
IT'S ART : I really appreciated the work you did for Douglas Coupland’s novel "The Gum Thief". Was it a new experience for you?
CRUSH : It was new for us. We had done a few things for the publishing world, but it was our first foray into the world of online marketing, where we pitched strategy, creative and execution. It was a perfect opportunity for us to implement our new model of being a “One Stop Shop”.
IT'S ART : Did you directly work with Douglas Coupland? Can you speak about the elaborating process?
CRUSH : We worked with Random House Canada and Doug as well. We presented the concept along with style fames of each of the strands. Doug loved the three that we went ahead with. He was really receptive to the whole approach, being an artist himself as well as an author. The three strands were our interpretations of how the characters might present themselves. He loved the idea. We then went through the book, looking for excerpts that might be good ways to tease the story as well as being stand alone pieces. We got Doug to go into a studio in Vancouver and do the reads to give them his unique stamp.
IT'S ART : Tell me about the clips in this project. How many were there? What are the tools you've used?
CRUSH : It was one campaign consisting of nine clips. The “Bethany” pieces were hand animated using a stills camera directly into a Mac laptop. The “Roger” pieces were shot with Crush’s Panasonic DDX100 and then the signs were done in Flame. The “Glove Pond” pieces were all done in After Effects. Vintage magazine ads were scanned as a starting point and then reworked or redone.
