Designer: Jonathan Gales
Firm: Factory Fifteen
Web, Web2
jonathan@factoryfifteen.com

About the Designer:
Born in Jersey, Channel Islands, Jonathan Gales trained in architecture; First Class honours in B.A from University of Brighton and Distinction in M.Arch from The Bartlett, UCL. Jonathan’s work focuses on the design of space and speculative environments using film and animation techniques. Jonathan’s work has won awards including first place in the image category of the Architectural 3D Awards 2011 and the Fitzroy Robinson Drawing Prize 2011. Jonathan’s work has been exhibited a at the Shanghai Expo 2010, the Royal Academy of Arts London and the Whitechapel Gallery. Jonathan is a founding member of Factory Fifteen, London.

About the Proposal:
The city is a centre of population and culture. It is also a concentration of built infrastructure, capital and architecture. The project focuses on the perception of the city in total construction; inspired by the incomplete states of world icons such as The Shard and Burj Khalifa. Megalomania is a short animation that explores the aesthetic of change as an ambiguous language that can be read as both growth and decay. The built environment of the city is explored as a labyrinth of architecture that is either unfinished, incomplete or broken. Megalomania is a response to the state of many developing cities, exaggerating the appearance of progress into the sublime.

The project took inspiration from Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s Carceri plates, which show a fictional architecture of prison environments. The geometry that make up the spaces within the Carceri series is ambiguous of its scale and enclosure and could be argued as impossible to be built. These themes were applied to envision an exaggerated contemporary urban construction site on the scale of a city. The project began by making a series of graphics that propose new architectures in, around and stacked on top of others. These graphics were then treated as scenes of the animation as well as becoming drawings that would stand alone.

The film is made up of a number of point of view and virtual camera movements, mixing between the experiential perspective of an individual alongside impossible camera positions elevated above the city. Megalomania was created predominantly using 3D CGI with some 2.5D animated sequences.

To see the film, please visit http://www.vimeo.com/25446891 (posted above)

Designer: Jean-Paul Frenay
www.frenayjp.be
Contact
Belgium

*Really excited about this post – an awesome short film with some of my favorite ingredients – a dash of Sci-Fi, minimal color palette and robots! Check out the rest of his work from the link listed above.

About the Work:
Artificial Paradise, Inc is an experimental film anticipating a future where a major corporation has developed an unique software, based on organic virtual reality, which holds all the lost memories of humankind. A user connects to this database of the forgotten…what is he searching for?

About the Artist:
Jean-Paul Frenay is a Belgian director, visual artist and musician working across disciplines in art direction, graphics design, photography, interactive media, film and motion.
Several of his projects such as his shortfilm “Artificial Paradise, Inc.” or his “VW bluemotion” commercial gave him the opportunity to be featured in numerous national and international industry leading festivals and publications such as Onedotzero, Stash, IDN, OFFF, Motionographer, Shots and Repérages.
He is also exploring other playgrounds, as a video artist and photographer, he occasionally works in performance arts creating visuals and interactive installations for plays, choreographies and experimental work.
His electro noise rock project I, the phoenix already got great national reviews and is known as the first belgian stereoscopic album.
His work is characterized by a strong visual style always trying to intrigue the viewer, to capture his attention and more importantly subtlety dive the viewer into his world…