Crops (Gerco de Ruijter) from Michel Banabila on Vimeo.

“Crops” by Gerco de Ruijter is a stop-motion film whose photography is entirely composed of aerial shots of 1000 irrigation circles captured from Google Earth. Each crop circle appears at a different stage of the irrigation cycle and has been formatted so that their immediate geographic context cannot be discerned (though nearly all are found in semiarid environments). Strung together, the circles become imbibed with a a clock-like motion, with the irrigation sprinkler infrastructure acting as the clock arm. Yet this steady meter quickly gives way to a flurry of flashing colors and shadows, leaving nothing but the impressions of what seems like a strange, alien arcanum of signs. The images blend into one another at a rapid frame rate whose acceleration is further accentuated by the score’s tense, rattling glissandi (by Michel Banabila). “Crops” is the starting point for a larger project de Ruijter is planning to release later in the year.

Source images for “Crops”

[via BLDGBLOG]

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Address Is Approximate from The Theory on Vimeo.

Do you know what your desk toys will be doing while you’re gone for Thanksgiving?

British filmmakers The Theory postulate on the secret lives of your belongings in this stop motion short, Address is Approximate. In the film, lonely office toys use their owner’s computer monitors to tour the world using Google StreetView.

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Pipe Plant from Sasha Aleksandrov on Vimeo.

It took 2 months of shooting for Moscow-based filmmaker Sasha Aleksandrov to capture the re-painting of the exteriors of an expansive Cold War-era industrial factory. It all unfolds in dramatic time-lapse in less than 4 minutes. To make the video, Aleksandrov shot by hand and on foot, using just a typical Nikon and a tripod. This meant that Aleksandrov, who calls himself an “operator”, had to set up a shot, take it, move the tripod over a foot (or precisely 29 cm, he maintains), before repeating the process thousands of times. He then used an off-the-shelf software to stabilize the shots in post-production.

The result of this intensive labor is a combination of stop-motion and time-lapse photography, otherwise known as hyper-lapse sequences, whereby the footage is made dynamic through the introduction of rotations and pans. So when the camera begins to move, that’s Aleksandrov following along the ground at 11-inch intervals over the course of an afternoon. As for the paint job itself, it’s a kind of Suprematist pastiche with typeface meant for Bolshevik slogans. But any excuse to photograph more decommissioned factories, right?

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MÖBIUS from ENESS on Vimeo.

Möbius is a nomadic public sculpture, made fluid and vagrant through stop-motion video. Australian environmental design outfit Eness placed 21 green triangles of various sizes throughout Federation Square in Melbourne. In what must have been a nightmare to coordinate, the team, along with a slew of eager volunteers, animated shots over the course of two weeks. The result: an undulating wave of green, whose movement is continuous, unimpeded by the constant flows of pedestrian traffic. At the video’s beginning, the sculpture seemingly awakes in a confined square, finding its way out, and spends its day exploring the city before stumbling upon a theatre at nightfall, where it concludes its dance center stage. The cycle of ebb-and-flow movements is the same, but the backdrop changes, as buildings disappear and as people come, interact, and move along.

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Proving that nothing seals a deal like a little stop motion, here’s the video that accompanied WORKac‘s winning proposal for St. Petersburg’s New Holland Island. The New York-based duo were awarded the commission last week.

Architect/animator Eric Lane produced the video, which dissects the project chronologically using a laser-cut model of the triangular island and WORKac’s proposed masterplan. It’s fascinating to see their scheme in motion, since the renderings revealed little about the design, which proposes a series of crescent-shaped voids and additions to the Island’s 300-year-old-infrastructure. You can check out the rest of Eric’s work over here.

Previously: WORKac Wins in Russia.

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Christian Tschoeke and David R. Davila, of Richard Meier + Partners, sent along this little stop-motion greeting today – and we thought we’d share with you all. They shot it on “one sunny Saturday afternoon” at the Meier + Partners offices here in NYC. Whatever you’re celebrating (or, not), enjoy the weekend.

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