David Schonauer
Vimeo Monday June 6, 2016
Filmmaker Michael Wiehart was one of the winners of the first International Motion Art Awards, for a short film inspired by science experiments done
at the C.E.R.N. particle collider in Switzerland. That film combined live action and 3D animation. Wiehart, founder of the the production company Visual Comforts, recently completed another project — a minute-and-a-half piece of 3D animation that he calls a “ visual amuse bouche.” Called
The Odyssey, it explores dangerous dark depths — and a child’s adventurous spirit. “It was interesting to see how far I could push this without the help of a big team and
render farm,” he says. Read the full Story >>
Vimeo Monday May 18, 2015
Anyone who’s ever visited the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn has marveled at the beauty of the institution’s 19th-century steam power plant, whose shining pipes and and exotic gauges are
showcased on tours of the art school. Filmmaker Dustin Cohen, an MAP reader and International Motion Art Awards winner, now takes you on a behind-the-scenes tour of the
plant with the man who’s been keeping it running since 1965, Pratt Chief Engineer Conrad Milster. “He is a character and a half, to put it lightly—sweet, endearing, quirky,
curmudgeon-y at times, and pretty much always interesting,” says Cohen, who has created a series of shorts showcasing Brooklyn artisans and craftspeople. Read the full Story >>
AI-AP Friday July 25, 2014
Are you getting your submissions ready for the third annual International Motion Art Awards? The deadline for entries is August 29. The awards honor the year’s best in live-action work and
animation, motion photography, motion illustration, and motion design—from documentary shorts and music videos to commercial motion graphics and fine-art video. Go to the IMAA archive to see
winners from previous competitions, and watch Motion Arts Pro for our series profiling past winners. Stay tuned to MAP in the coming weeks for more announcements about this year’s
contest—and to find out who will be judging your work. Read the full Story >>
AI-AP Friday July 25, 2014
Are you a photographer who’s also working in video? If so, you should be reading our sister newsletter, Motion Arts
Pro, and thinking about entering the third annual International Motion Art Awards, The deadline for entries is August 29. The awards honor the year’s best in live-action work and animation,
motion photography, motion illustration, and motion design—from documentary shorts and music videos to commercial motion graphics and fine-art video. Go to the IMAA archive to see winners from previous competitions, and watch Motion Arts Pro for our series profiling past winners. You’ll find submission
information at the AI-AP website. We’re looking forward to seeing your work! Read the full Story >>
Vimeo Thursday August 20, 2015
Brooklyn-based illustrator and animator Richard Borge, who is a past winner of the International Motion Art Awards (see this close-up, as well as this one), has created a new music video with electronic hip-hop band Honey Claws that
is stirring things up on online. The video is for the song “Digital Animal,” which was used in an episode of the AMC series Breaking Bad. As Borge explains at altpik, he was experimenting with Aftereffects one night when he heard the song and decided to incorporate
it into his video. He later made contact with the band through Instagram and began working on a full music vid for the song. “It's looking insane,” Borge tells us. Read the full Story >>
By David Schonauer Thursday May 22, 2014
Earlier this year, we featured Chicago-based photographer and filmmaker Sandro Miller's International Motion Art Award-winning short piece "Ecstasy," an unsettling nightmare featuring actor John
Malkovich as a drugged-out nightclub denizen named Vinny. This week we're back with another IMAA winner from Miller. Titled "Nick Cave: Dream Bigger Dreams," it is a compilation of eight video pieces
created to accompany an exhibition by the noted … Read the full Story >>
YouTube Tuesday August 4, 2015
North Carolina-based photographer and filmmaker Andrew Kornylak was in Atlanta in late May to shoot a wedding, and, as he notes,
“Whenever I'm back in Atlanta, it seems like the stars align to shoot something with Little Tybee.” Kornylak, who was named a winner of the first International Motion Art Awards for a music video he shot with the band, soon
found himself at work on a new project for Little Tybee’s single “Tuck My Tail.” Lead singer Brock Scott wanted to feature band members appearing and disappearing in different rooms
in an abandoned Atlanta middle school. The video was shot with a Sony FS700 And Odyssey 7Q in 4K RAW, mounted to a DJI Ronin gimbal. Read the full Story >>
Facebook Thursday January 26, 2017
The animated short Return
Flight: A Fish’s Journey Through the Airport, a winner of the International Motion Art Award 5 competition, was recently voted the Community Winner by readers of the IMAA Facebook page. The
short, directed by Marisa Ginger Tontaveetong and animated by Yu Ueda with character design by Ai Zhang, was produced through a program sponsored by the Atlanta Film Society and Atlanta International
Airport and shown at airport kiosks throughout 2016. “Simply put, Return Flight was inspired by the director's exhaustive traveling experience,” notes Tontaveetong. Go here for a “making of” video. Read the full Story >>
By David Schonauer Wednesday January 30, 2013
Continuing with our series featuring winners of the first annual International Motion Art Awards, we feature Danijel Zezelj's intriguing and beautiful animated short "A Different Bunny," the story "of
small bunny in a big city looking for love in the wrong place." Zezelj, a Brooklyn-based graphic novelist, painter, animator, and illustrator, made the two-and-a-half minute film as experiment to
research using still images in … Read the full Story >>
AI-AP Monday August 22, 2016
The jury for IMAA 5 has now been announced as well. The judges for the competition this year are Aaron Byrd, Art Director, Video & Motion Design, the New York Times; Robin
Daily, Freelance Art and Video Producer; performance artist Karen Finley; Douglass Grimett, Founder/President of Atlanta-based digital design firm Primal
Screen; illustrator and cartoonist Hellen Jo; Ida Lew, Senior Producer, Foot, Cone & Belding; Chester Mayer, President/Executive Producer,
Harpoon Pictures; Will McCord, Filmmaker and Editor, MTA, and Freelance, Existential Entertainment Group; Antonio Navas; Mark Newgarden, cartoonist
and President of Laffpix Inc; Mickey Paxton, SVP ECD, Altice USA; and Sean Robertson,Creative Director, Ogilvy & Mather. Meet them all at AI-AP. Read the full Story >>
By David Schonauer Thursday October 17, 2013
"Art and science serve the same function: to keep alive the feeling of wonder about the world we live in. I am driven by the search for a truth that lies below the perceptible world," writes artist
Bryan Christie in an artist statement for one of his video installations. For Christie, who has worked as a medical illustrator and the art director of Scientific … Read the full Story >>
By David Schonauer Monday June 24, 2013
A number of weeks ago, we featured animator Rob Donnelly's International Motion Art Awards-winning short for Slate magazine's online "Dear Prudence" advice column. For that piece, which illustrated a
call for help from a woman who found out her boyfriend had been secretly taking naughty pictures of neighbors, Donnelly was inspired by Alfred Hitchcock's classic film "Rear Window." It wasn't
Donnelly's only IMAA-winner, however: … Read the full Story >>
By David Schonauer Friday March 8, 2013
RJ Muna's video "Written in the Margins" is, he says, your typical "boy meets girl, boy goes crazy, girl calms him down, happy ending" kind of story. But Muna, an award-winning photographer based in
San Francisco who has transitioned to filmmaking, is less interested in narrative than image: His intriguing stop-motion piece, actually a kind of backward stop-motion, is a hazy meditation on what … Read the full Story >>
By David Schonauer Friday September 6, 2013
"Motion to me is an obvious next step. But just because something moves, it doesn't mean it will work or be interesting," says Craig Cutler, the noted New York-based photographer known for his
conceptual approach to commercial work. Cutler's move into motion follows along the same creative lines, exploring ideas and process. Design is central to both his still and video projects--he calls
himself … Read the full Story >>
By David Schonauer Friday June 21, 2013
In the "Peanuts," comic strip, Charley Brown's beagle Snoopy often sat atop his doghouse and imagined himself as daring World War I ace dueling with the dastardly Red Baron. The hero of Brooklyn-based
illustrator-turned-animator Richard Borge's IMAA-winning short "Rooster" is a toy chicken who dreams of being a World War II pilot. Borge created the delightful 1:16 animated piece for a competition
in which … Read the full Story >>
By David Schonauer Wednesday January 30, 2013
We continue with our series spotlighting winners from the first International Motion Art Awards, which honor the year's best art and design in a variety of motion genres: Today we feature photographer
and transitioning filmmaker Dario Acosta's "The Music At My Fingertips," a 2:26 live-action video portrait of the pianist Xiayin Wang. Acosta, who specializes in photographing classical musicians and
singers, had just finished … Read the full Story >>
By David Schonauer Friday February 22, 2013
Our look at winners from the first International Motion Art Awards continues with filmmaker Michael Wiehart's 3:20 short "RE:LEASE," an abstract narrative--he calls it "a musical travelog through an
atmospheric world in black white and red"--that combines live action and show-motions shots of liquids captured with a high-speed digital camera and 3D animation. The inspiration for this astonishing
piece of motion art was science: … Read the full Story >>
By David Schonauer Monday May 13, 2013
Chris Sickels's specialty is creating two-dimensional print illustrations by photographing three-dimensional puppets. So branching into stop-motion animation was certainly not a big jump for him. "My
interest in stop-motion grew out of my childhood love of the Rankin/Bass stop-motion films of the 1960s and from my exposure to the Spike and Mike's animation festivals during my college years," he
says. Sickels was named a … Read the full Story >>
By David Schonauer Friday August 16, 2013
"The animation work I do often migrates back and forth from static to moving image and back again," notes Jonathon Rosen. "Paintings and illustrations are reconfigured, layered, and animated, and
illustrations and paintings can come out of the video as modified or collaged stills." Rosen's style is on full display in his International Motion Art Awards-winning video piece, a personal project
that features a … Read the full Story >>
By David Schonauer Friday November 15, 2013
Filmmakers have been gazing at the moon in wonderment almost as long as films have been made. Georges Melies's 1902 French silent "A Trip to the Moon" famously gave the shining orb a human face and
personality, and so does animator Aleson Ho in her International Motion Art Awards-winning "The Man Who Shot the Moon." While Melies used ground-breaking special effects to tell his … Read the full Story >>
