After a good night’s rest we went back to Oeiras for the annual OFFF festival. In the daily OFFF-paper I read which keynote speakers where next in line. In order of appearance: Aaron Koblin, Campagne Valentine, Robert L. Peters, ONESIZE, Aaron Koblin, PEZ, Paula Scher and the biggest showman of them all… Joshua Davis!

Aaron Koblin

‘Aaron Koblin is an artist specializing in data visualization. His work takes social and infrastructural data and uses it to examine cultural trends and emergent patterns.’ (bron: aaronkoblin.com)

I couldn’t say it better. At OFFF Aaron showed his research in which he uses the Internet as a collective work force. A really funny project is ‘a bicyle built for 2000’ ’ where people were asked to imitate a little sound. Played together this makes a very interesting soundscape of the song “Daisy Bell”, the first example of computer-synthesized vocals.

http://www.vimeo.com/3571124

But besides these collective experiments Aaron also made a videoclip for Radiohead’s song ‘House of Card’s’.
‘Lasers and sensors are used to scan the band Radiohead into a three-dimensional particle-driven data experience. The code and data are launched on Google Code as an open source “music video without video” project.’ (bron: aaronkoblin.com)

If you visit the website you can even turn the 3D models around.

A MUST SEE is his visualisation of the air traffic in Nord America! (project info page)

“The things you don’t expect are more interesting.” (Aaron Koblin)

(live presentation@offf)

(Aaron @ vimeo)

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Campagne Valentine

Showreel

http://www.vimeo.com/3471330

This rather excentric duo could not convince me with there visual style, but I do want to give you their  website & blog.

(Picture by the OFFF team)

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Robert L. Peters

Robert L. Peters was (together with Neville Brody and Paula Scher) one of the most experienced designers at the OFFF festival. I thought his lecture about the design process was very inspiring and very helpful. Especially his manifest:

“I have not falied 10.000 times, i found 10 000 ways of work that doesn’t work” (Thomas Edison)

“Be a surrogate, dream for your clients” (Robert L. Peters)

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ONESIZE

These Dutch dudes made the ‘Sponsor titles’ for this years OFFF. The result is an amazing combination of live video and CG effects. Step by step they explained the progress of making this movie.

http://www.vimeo.com/4692229

(live presentation @ offf)

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PEZ

And then there was PEZ, the one man’s show of lovely stop motion short films. All do Pez never intended to become an animator, he now is one of the best stop motion directors on the field (after Tim Burton that is!).

He made his debut online with his Youtube movie called ‘Sex on the roof’ about two old chairs that have sex on the roof. The anecdote behind the movie is actually that he got the chairs from his parents and when he was little he wasn’t aloud to touch them because they were only used at Sundays and holydays. So when he got them as a gift he thought ‘What would these two chairs would like to do after years of isolation?’

Now many company’s ask him to make commercials for them and with a fairly big film cru he made many different commercials. These are my favourites:

more fun commercials: Bacardi, Tiktak, sprint, etc…

Of course PEZ doesn’t only make commercials. His most recent shortmovie is called ‘Western Spaghetti’:

More of he’s very entertaining work on his website.

“I try to make people look at objects in a different way” (PEZ)

(live presentation@offf)

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Paula Scher

I heard so much about her but this was the first time I saw her, Paula Scher. This graphic designer is bin around for a very long time, I was still in my diapers when she became a big influence to the graphic industry. The cool thing about her design is  that she didn’t like the clean, Dutch design from her time and started to make images that didn’t have one strait line in them. I just love that philosophy, all do I like the Helvetica, I can’t use it al the time. It is just to sterile.

Of course Paula is one of the old style graphic designer, she likes to paint and she does not have much affection for the computer. But still she has very up to date work and she showed some great examples of that in her presentation:

This project was kind of funny because, they asked her  (Pentagram) to make a new city logo. But they wanted the logo for al the wrong reasons. What they wanted achieve was getting people to go walking, shopping, etc. to a part of town that was on the other side of the highways. You could walk under the highways by using the bridges but those looked absolutely not attractive. So they wanted a new logo but what they got was a painted bridge, but they loved it and the bridges will all soon look like this:

“Citybank was more honest than the art gallery” (Paula Scher)

(live presentatie @ offf)

(TED talk Paula Scher)

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Joshua Davis

Anyone who doesn’t know this dude should look him up online. This true showman can rock a crowd! Few years back Joshua became famous in the multimedia subculture for his random computer generated illustrations. He was and is a big influence and inspiration to many developers and designers. That fact is proven again this year at OFFF because almost every guest speaker has experimented with computer generated designs. You could say that he showed us how to let programming and design flow in to each other.

(foto ©offf-team)

And also this year the charismatic American inspires the overflowing room of 3 to 4 thousant people with new illustrative computer experiments. In the exhibition room there was an installation he made in collaboration with ‘Float 4 interactive’ in which he plays with code, design and interactivity.

Vooral het offf thema lag Joshua blijkbaar nauw aan het hart, in dit fragment heeft hij het dan ook over failing gracefully.

(live presentation @ offf)