Rome is the latest result from a collaboration between Aaron Koblin and Mr.doob. They partnered up with the people from Google Chrome, North Kingdom, Radical Media, Mirada and Oddball Animation to create a music for the song ‘Black’ on Danger Mouse & Daniel Luppi’s new album called Rome.

The movie starts of with plane video footage, nicely shot, but nothing new. Once you fall asleep, you enter a 3D dream world where you are in control of what you see and how you change the environment. From changing a city into a green environment, to letting dark bulls and spiders run through a vast and open landscape, the animation is mesmerizing, jaw dropping and intensely inspirational.
And if that is not enough, the film ends in an open landscape where you can add your own pieces of artwork. When the films ends, you can enter the editor and add new objects in a similar style as Mindcraft. Your object will be added in the sky or on the surface of the last landscape where you and your birds will fly over.

Rome is one of the first good examples of what interactive experiences without Flash look like. It is mostly build in WebGL, a component that works inside HTML5′s canvas element and which enables hardware-accelerated 3D graphics. Apart from using this technology to its fullest, it uses Three.js for 3D generation and reflection and Processing.js as a simpler language to control the graphics. These are all open standards, which you can use yourself. Check out their Tech-page to learn more.

The film may not work in most browsers, nor on many computer, but it promises and exciting future for animation and rich interactive experiences on the web. For me it’s both an example and an inspiration for what is possible. And I hope many agree.

I have really enjoyed this video series” Ikea-the art of cooking”  from Carl Kleiner. Click more to see more of those as well as an older collaboration of Carl Kleiner and IKEA,  the IKEA Cookbook “Hembakat är Bäst”.

Images © Carl Kleiner

This sunday, I visited the exhibition: 6 Billion Others, a Yann Arthus-Bertrand video exhibition about thousands of men and women testimonies from all around the world. A GoodPlanet project.

Visitors start off the visit with a mosaic of expressive faces that surround them as they enter the heart of the exhibition. They then proceed to enter a larger space that contains twenty screening areas. In each, visitors can watch a film about a given theme and thereby share with people from the world over the answers to questions asked by reporters in all four corners of our planet.

Join ’6 Billion Others’ till June 19th in Brussels, Tour & taxis

A very nice idea and animation from Lauri Warsta (Royal college of London). A dictaphone has been put into a package and is send to Helsinki. The animation visualizes the sound of the recording, transport vehicles, voices of deliverymen etc. Dictaphone Parcel was awarded the Passion Pictures Prize in London, in February 2010.

I know, another movie on Parfois, but Blu posted a new stop motion movie and you don’t want to miss it!

A few days ago, I was very pleased to discover Gilberto Esparza, a mexican artist, which is interested in making robots that interact with the enviroment. His last project, Plantas Nomadas, is a robot that works with the help of microorganisms and contaminated river water. The key for this process is the microbial fuel cells. According to wikipedia : “A microbial fuel cell (MFC) is a bio-electrochemilcal system that drives a current by mimicking bacterial interactions found in nature.[...] A microbial fuel cell is a device that converts chemical energy to electrical energy by the catalytic reaction of microorganisms.” Summing up, Plantas Nomadas is a self-sufficient robot that can walk to the river and drink contaminated water. Through a microbial fuel cell proccess, the produced energy feeds the robot and make it able to walk, while the surplus  helps the plants to grow. A great interaction between technology and life cycle.

I encourage you to have a look at his past project, Parasitos Urbanos, where small robotic creatures interact with the urban enviroment.

Both projects are nicely illustrated as well.

Meindbender is a Swiss based animation studio. Their animations are all completely rendered so no stop motion. Very humoristic movies with a focus on expression. U can watch al the movies they did for cartoon network here.

“Het klokhuis” is the longest running dutch tv show for children. They explain how things work and give information about all kinds of things, from how a computer works to why zebras have stripes. Design agency Kesselskramer got the assignment to make the opening sequence and end sequence. I saw some lectures from Kessels Kramer himself and I have to say, they’re good! I’ll write a post about him next week. In this animation they use 3D printing and they are the first ever to do so. The opening movie is shown above and the end sequence with some pictures of the making of is at read more.