Nervo and Barbarian Group for FOX Japan

Nervo (Nando Costa’s design and animation shop) created a series of dark and spooky IDs for FOX Movies, a new sci-fi and horror channel launched in Japan and Argentina.

My favorites are the second and third from the bottom, which were completed with the help of Robert Hodgin of The Barbarian Group. Here’s the skinny from Flight 404, Robert’s Processing blog:

What he needed from us was videos of flocking behavior. He had seen the previous experiments I have done with perlin noise flocking and thought it would work well for this project. All he wanted was a couple videos of flocking using a 3D crow (or is it a raven) he would provide. Simple enough. But given the tight deadline, the thought of doing a render and posting it and waiting for approval or changes and then implementing the changes then rerendering and reposting, etc… Well, it just didn’t make sense for this project. So we decided to try something different.

That “something different” was writing an application in Processing that Nando could use to build his own customizable flocking behavior. By creating reusable software to solve the problem, the Barbarian Group gave Nervo more options than one-off animations could provide. Software engines also encourage experimentation and creative play.

If you caught Motion Theory‘s presentation at OFFF NYC, you know they did something similar for their NYC Tourism spot. To pull-off the transition from Van Gogh’s Starry Night to Central Park, they rolled their own paint simulation software. It’s beautiful stuff, and as an added bonus, with a few tweaks it can be used for future projects as well.

For those of you who want to learn more about Processing, there are now two good books available: one written by Ben Fry and Casey Reas, the creators of Processing, and one from Friends of Ed.