After having spent several months last year working on the Future of Money, it’s inspiring to see ever more startup initiatives that seek to create new economic structures. Berlin-based friendfund takes a fresh approach to sharing expenses with friends they call friendfunding. While this sort of thing may seem familiar, it’s an entirely separate concept from crowdfunding. Whereas platforms like Kickstarter tap into the generosity of amicable strangers to achieve a fundraising goal, friendfund works directly with people you know and the power of real social networks.

The friendfund team approached us to create an explanatory video which presents their service simply and clearly for a general audience. KS12 got involved in every stage of the process, from script development to music composition. We decided to make use of a simple analog motion graphics technique, manipulating photo cutouts in time to a voiceover. This style worked well to compliment the screencast portion of the video. And of course a critical asset to the production was the diverse group of extras who lent their hands to the images.

We hope you enjoy the new friendfund video and look forward to hearing from you about your next explanatory video project!

This entry crossposted from ks12.net.

This is the new transmediale.11 festival trailer from Emilia Forstreuter and ®.

KS12 is participating at this year’s transmediale (1 – 6 February 2011). We will be part of “The Open Zone” and produce an immediated autodocumentary video. We are going to screen the result the last day of the festival.

Jesse Zanzinger sent us his music visualization for the Four Tet track Circling for consideration for the blog. We like it very much and are happy to share it here! It’s great to see how an analog motion graphics piece fascinates a huge group of people; as of this writing Refraction has over 156K views on Vimeo. Of course, Jesse’s high quality macro shots are what makes this piece great. Jesse writes in the comments on the video, “shot with a flat bottom glass on top of iPhone, brightness cranked up, camera looking straight down.” — I always love finding out the “secret” behind a video. Perhaps the biggest secrets in this video are the vintage animations used as the source material for some of the refractions. Great choices for this hybrid approach!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Sesame Street “123456789101112″

Click here to view the embedded video.

Yellow Submarine “When I´m Sixty-Four”

Thanks to my friend Mayte for the tip about this funny.

In the Summer of 2010 I led fourth semester motion design students at the Berliner Technische Kunsthochschule in an Analog Motion Graphics assignment to visualize a series of haiku poems.
The 21 poems were written and recited by Branden Dashiell – a wonderful poet and old friend from college – who put a contemporary twist on traditional themes of seasons and days of the week. The students were challenged to find different techniques to interpret the poems. Approaches included the capillary action of coffee spreading through a paper towel, elaborate paper cut-outs, plexiglas manipulation of raw meat, as well as capturing the reflections from various different shiny surfaces. The final results are a colorful mixture of very abstract and more illustrative work.

The poet Brandon Dashiell.

Come join us at the DMY Maker Lab!
9-13 June 2010
DMY Festival
Tempelhof Airport, Berlin

The DMY Maker Lab will be a celebration of Open Design through practice, presentations, and collaborative action, created by instigators and participants alike.

The DMY Maker Lab is an emergent event, enabled by Jay Cousins, Gabriel Shalom, Michelle Thorne, Pedro Pineda, and Luis Berríos-Negrón. Initiated by numerous members of the Berlin Open Design community and sponsored by DMY, Etsy and Becks, and ultimately created in collaboration with you!

At the Maker Lab, we’ll be hosting various stations for participants to learn, play and build upon the design of others. With an array of processes, technologies and tools such as 3D printers, laser cutters, bio plastics, Arduino, analog motion graphics, weaving, knitting, and other do-it-yourself technologies, participants will learn and create together.

At the center of the event is a Mindscape, a discussion cluster featuring workshops, sessions, and conversations about open design. Most of all, we welcome you to stop by and share your thoughts, even plan a session spontaneously using our open space format. Topics could include new collaboration methods, the future of open design, business models, as well as sharing skills on specific design processes.

In addition we will be encouraging everyone who participates to engage in the documentation process, either by helping to build and transform an evolving monument, or by contributing digitally as an immediator; posting photos to our flickr group ( flickr.com/groups/dmymakerlab ) and/or sending tweets using the #dmymakerlab tag.

From this point of inspiration along with instructions, demonstrations and workshops, we invite you to engage with the space, tools, processes and people. To create together, participating in our numerous activities, or even instigating your own.

We would be thrilled if you would like stop by, lead a discussion, or share a skill, run a workshop, or begin a collaborative project at the Maker Lab. Please contact Pedro pedro_pb (at) live (dot) com or Michelle michelle (at) creativecommons (dot) org to schedule a time and topic or to attend one of the specific workshops.

Visit od10beta.info/dmy-maker-lab/ or dmy-berlin.com/en/festival/2010/maker-lab/ for more info on specific workshops, resources and events.

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music:
“Illusion” by Maersk

from the monome community remix project

photos:
flickr.com/groups/dmymakerlab

video:
Annika Bauer, Patrizia Kommerell, Gabriel Shalom
ks12.net

Click here to view the embedded video.

A thought-provoking speech about the effects of the pace of life in different parts of the world, visualized with hi-speed whiteboard info graphics. A frenetic and humorous approach which demonstrates the power of a good graphic recording can also make for great analog motion. Thanks to Mark Frazier for the link. Incidentally, our friend Anna Lena Schiller is a great graphic recorder in Berlin!

With this great example of analog motion the Langara College showed their “tips for better ideas” in an inventive and creative way. Instead of literally illustrating them, they found a mixture of different techniques for the visualization. In addition to papercrafted collages there is also a use of light and shadow, accordion folding, black light, and many other devices which work well in the context of the sketchbook format. An elaborate, funny, and often surprising piece.

During the Winter semester 2009/2010 I led a class of 23 fourth semester motion design students at the Berliner Technische Kunsthochschule in an Analog Motion Graphics assignment to collaboratively re-create a vintage drive-in movie theater intermission film. The original intermission film was obtained from the Internet Archive. I transcribed the audio track into an eleven page screenplay which, together with the audio, was used as the basis of the assignment. Students were not shown the original film until the end of the semester at the final presentation.

Using the audio and text as a guide, each group of students pitched concepts for their favorite of the 25 different clips in the film and created approximately 60 seconds of material using Analog Motion techniques. Students often spoofed the informational/commercial messages in the film, offering a critical and at times farcical update to the dated language and cultural assumptions from the 1960s-era film.