November 22, 2011 - Comments Off on Mac and Mash

Mac and Mash

Busy Monday here at the Mechanism. So much so, in fact, that our Monday meeting was pushed to Tuesday and as such so is my morning sketch. I wish you all a very happy, over-stuffed, Thanksgiving! And feeling the spirit of the season I decided to fill your turkey-induced coma on Thursday with scary dreams! Enjoy!

Thanksgiving Nightmare

Choosing stills this week was tough since there's so much out there in such a wide variety of mediums. However I don't know if I've done a photography highlight before (excluding photographs of street-art of course) so today we take a look at the work of Michael Wolf, namely his new "Tokyo Compression" series. Being a daily commuter in NYC I can commiserate with these people yet their commute feels somehow worse through Wolf's lens. He captures the sense of profound claustrophobic isolation one feels in that morning hustle and bustle. The frames of the subway doors and windows add texture and depth to the pieces while also further isolating the subjects in their discomfort. The varying states of distress, boredom, awareness and general diversity of the commuters pulls each one out of the random press of people, shining a light on their moment of introspection and invasion.

Commuting BeautyCommuting Sleeper

Today in web we have the brilliant personal site for and by Martin Gauer. It actually reminds me, at least in concept, of my own site due to to the street setting. It also does what I think all truly innovative web design strives for: to make the browser an engaging window onto another world born entirely of the site's purpose. Here the message happens to be "I make really freakin' cool websites!" The use of parallax motion fortifies the first person perspective illusion to the point of realism. I'm just a little upset there isn't more content in the portfolio section...from what I can see; one downside of such experimental sites is the risk of muddled navigation though Gauer makes it clear enough with a little experimentation. Regardless, this site does perfectly what it sets out to do a.k.a. blow your HTML/CSS/Javascript-coding fingers clean off.

Martin Gauer

Motion was another very difficult category to pick this week. What with killer cyborgs, samurai swords, two Skyrim musical tributes and my new favorite band all coming onto my interwebs radar in a seven day period or so. However, in the spirit of these blogs only one video could reign supreme (or well at least embed supreme since I cheated with hyperlinks). "Keep Drawing" is a collaborative animation effort...or is it? In fact its the work of a fairly small animation team who rotoscoped a series of clips drawing every frame, I'd guess on the threes, in widely varying styles. It reminds me a lot of the crowd-sourced animation used to make the Johnny Cash music video for "Ain't No Grave." Moreover it's like my menagerie-mess of a sketchbook come to life which is awesome! Well done.

Eat well and prosper my friends.

The Sketching Mechanism is a series of weekly posts, published on Mondays, containing the artistic musings of Mobile Designer/Developer Ben Chirlin during our Monday morning meeting at the NY Creative Bunker as well as his inspiring artistic finds of the week.

Published by: benchirlin in The Sketching Mechanism

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