Uber-cool visual pioneers onedotzero recently invited us to the launch of their fantastic co-lab project with broadcasting giant MTV International: Bloom.
Bloom was a worldwide competition that searched for the very best up-and coming creative talent. New filmmakers, animators and other creatives were invited to send a treatment for a one minute film that explored the identity and community of their hometown in a fresh way.
The competition received over 200 entries from over 30 countries around the globe as far as Australia, South America and Asia.
After much deliberation the judging panel finally selected 10 winning entries from Auckland, Beijing, Rome, New York, London, Bergen, Warsaw, Los Angeles, Paris and Sheffield with runners up hailing from Tokyo, London, Bucharest and the Netherlands.
The entries were judged on innovation, style, technical skill and creative interpretation of the bloom brief. The winning treatments were commissioned in 2007, and the artists given budgets to create and develop their one minute films for January 2008.
As each film was a one minute treatment we armed ourselves with our Dictaphone, donned our coats (and silly hat) and marched to the snazzy east london venue to get a one minute interview with each of the international talent that was at the launch.
Bloom was a worldwide competition that searched for the very best up-and coming creative talent. New filmmakers, animators and other creatives were invited to send a treatment for a one minute film that explored the identity and community of their hometown in a fresh way.
The competition received over 200 entries from over 30 countries around the globe as far as Australia, South America and Asia.
After much deliberation the judging panel finally selected 10 winning entries from Auckland, Beijing, Rome, New York, London, Bergen, Warsaw, Los Angeles, Paris and Sheffield with runners up hailing from Tokyo, London, Bucharest and the Netherlands.
The entries were judged on innovation, style, technical skill and creative interpretation of the bloom brief. The winning treatments were commissioned in 2007, and the artists given budgets to create and develop their one minute films for January 2008.
As each film was a one minute treatment we armed ourselves with our Dictaphone, donned our coats (and silly hat) and marched to the snazzy east london venue to get a one minute interview with each of the international talent that was at the launch.
The quality of the work on show was astounding – and the talent ranged from professionals to undergraduate students.
Here is the list of winners (in no particular order)
Quayola : Rome
Lulu Li : Beijing Dance
Ayala Sharot : Foreigners
Matt Bullock & Rebekah Cooper : Cityfix
Igor Knezevic : Proxies
The Holograms : Morfism
Katarzyna Kjek and Prezemyslaw Adamski : Untitled
Ryan Louie : Untitled
Marieke Verbiesen : Nordic Folk Legends
Niel Grundy & Alyssa Kath : Lone Kauri Road
But wait! It gets better! We were lucky enough to chat to some of the winning artists!!
Here is the list of winners (in no particular order)
Quayola : Rome
Lulu Li : Beijing Dance
Ayala Sharot : Foreigners
Matt Bullock & Rebekah Cooper : Cityfix
Igor Knezevic : Proxies
The Holograms : Morfism
Katarzyna Kjek and Prezemyslaw Adamski : Untitled
Ryan Louie : Untitled
Marieke Verbiesen : Nordic Folk Legends
Niel Grundy & Alyssa Kath : Lone Kauri Road
But wait! It gets better! We were lucky enough to chat to some of the winning artists!!
One particular entrant was Ryan Louis, a recent graduate from New York University Film School, who filled us in on what inspired his urban focused piece.
“My piece basically is on New York, I wanted to tell a story in colours, lights and moods. It was really just about the idea of living in the city the anxiety and the excitement… Mostly the anxiety.
There is a lot of energy there – tense energy. And I can work from that
It was a hard project and a hard process – as it was my first time doing animation. But I had a good sense of the moods and emotions that I wanted to convey.
My main goal is to become a director – so this was huge opportunity for me. MTV and onedotzero are prestigious huge companies and this is a… the one big chance for me. The feedback and attention that I have had from this is great. Its definitely great to be here.
Its really different also - I feel that as a student filmmaker often you get tread on and treated like shit – so this is a very, very huge deal for me to have people wanting to listen and hear what I have to say.”
The UK was represented brilliantly by some more undergraduate magic makers Matt Bullock & Rebekah Cooper. Matt and Rebekah who still completing their degree in Sheffield. They had this to say to us:
“Our piece is about celebrating industrial architecture in a post industrial age and finding the beauty in it.
In Sheffield, we realised that there is loads of really amazing industrial architecture and industrial heriatage of the steel industry. There is an amazing huge complex called Parkhill flats which is the biggest of its kind in Europe.
It’s a social housing estate and until you see it you don’t realise how magnificent it is. It’s just the hugest housing structure that you have ever seen.
It has got run down and there are loads of crappy flats popping up around the city - so the point of our video is to look at the old architecture (like the cooling towers which are going to be getting knocked down) and try and put a case across that we should be building and developing around the architecture rather than knocking it down and starting again.
This one is the first video we have ever made –and were only halfway through our graphic design course so doing a video piece was new, but in the end we have got more out of this that we ever thought we could. And I think that we’ve really fallen in love with the idea of communicating a language through motion. So compared to when we started now we have got more out of it than we ever intended to.”
“My piece basically is on New York, I wanted to tell a story in colours, lights and moods. It was really just about the idea of living in the city the anxiety and the excitement… Mostly the anxiety.
There is a lot of energy there – tense energy. And I can work from that
It was a hard project and a hard process – as it was my first time doing animation. But I had a good sense of the moods and emotions that I wanted to convey.
My main goal is to become a director – so this was huge opportunity for me. MTV and onedotzero are prestigious huge companies and this is a… the one big chance for me. The feedback and attention that I have had from this is great. Its definitely great to be here.
Its really different also - I feel that as a student filmmaker often you get tread on and treated like shit – so this is a very, very huge deal for me to have people wanting to listen and hear what I have to say.”
The UK was represented brilliantly by some more undergraduate magic makers Matt Bullock & Rebekah Cooper. Matt and Rebekah who still completing their degree in Sheffield. They had this to say to us:
“Our piece is about celebrating industrial architecture in a post industrial age and finding the beauty in it.
In Sheffield, we realised that there is loads of really amazing industrial architecture and industrial heriatage of the steel industry. There is an amazing huge complex called Parkhill flats which is the biggest of its kind in Europe.
It’s a social housing estate and until you see it you don’t realise how magnificent it is. It’s just the hugest housing structure that you have ever seen.
It has got run down and there are loads of crappy flats popping up around the city - so the point of our video is to look at the old architecture (like the cooling towers which are going to be getting knocked down) and try and put a case across that we should be building and developing around the architecture rather than knocking it down and starting again.
This one is the first video we have ever made –and were only halfway through our graphic design course so doing a video piece was new, but in the end we have got more out of this that we ever thought we could. And I think that we’ve really fallen in love with the idea of communicating a language through motion. So compared to when we started now we have got more out of it than we ever intended to.”
Director Ayla Sharot explored her feelings and experiences when she moved to London in her piece “Foreigners”
“I like the element of surprise – it’s not just my ideas. People say things that surprise me and you can react to that and it makes the whole thing a bit more attractive. So its nice to be able to develop things with that sort of input.
The Film Foreigners came from moving to London. I came to London three and half years ago and its sort of a documentation of my experience. When you come here as a foreigner it’s so different, you know, there are many cultural differences. You go to the pub, and you don’t hear what people say and you don’t get jokes as fast, you know stuff like that. I now freelance in Soho after completing my masters at St Martins. I now work all over. I really want to start to direct myself and I really hope this will help and be a platform for to launch myself into it. I mean I can always get work animating someone else’s visuals or ideas but like any other animator I would like to do my own stuff.”.
The Polish winners Katarzyna Kjek and Prezemyslaw Adamski explained their Bloom experience to us.
“We found it strange that we were waiting so long… all the scripts were completed during summer time and we found it very, very difficult to release it during winter time as all the places outside were very cloudy, so we had to use an awful lot of post production that we didn’t intend to use in the beginning!
The film is about immigration. We were, or became, one of those people coming to London to find work by working on this film and being involved in the project.”
We were lucky enough to chat to a Reel office favorite – the mighty Quayola (featured in last months issue) about his piece “Rome” and how the concept, visuals and feel came together in his work :
“In a way the fact that I’m Italian and that I’m from Rome its quite obvious the relationship between me and the sort of iconic piece of art and architecture (in the film). Its contextualizing those icons that makes the piece…. It’s a sort of deconstruction of those icons to the point that they become something else. In a way it makes you see those icons at a different angle, in a hyper real way.
This is a project that I’ve been bringing forward for a while and if you go to my site and see my work you can see that. There are a few projects that I have been working on for quite a long time and this submission, this opportunity, me was a chance to bring forward my own research and this exploration of these icons. The theme is quite obvious but its more my work that fits in the theme rather than the other way around.
I’m definitely happy about this – it took quite a while to get these projects together and in the meanwhile I have been doing other projects for Onedotzero and stuff and projects of my own. I had some exposure at MTV in Italy but obviously to have such big exposure on MTV internationally… that is something I’m looking forward to! I don’t know!”
The Bloom Project work is being broadcast worldwide on the MTV network and are available to view online at http://www.mtvonedotzero.com/. We are also featuring the spots in the upcoming issue of The Reel.
“I like the element of surprise – it’s not just my ideas. People say things that surprise me and you can react to that and it makes the whole thing a bit more attractive. So its nice to be able to develop things with that sort of input.
The Film Foreigners came from moving to London. I came to London three and half years ago and its sort of a documentation of my experience. When you come here as a foreigner it’s so different, you know, there are many cultural differences. You go to the pub, and you don’t hear what people say and you don’t get jokes as fast, you know stuff like that. I now freelance in Soho after completing my masters at St Martins. I now work all over. I really want to start to direct myself and I really hope this will help and be a platform for to launch myself into it. I mean I can always get work animating someone else’s visuals or ideas but like any other animator I would like to do my own stuff.”.
The Polish winners Katarzyna Kjek and Prezemyslaw Adamski explained their Bloom experience to us.
“We found it strange that we were waiting so long… all the scripts were completed during summer time and we found it very, very difficult to release it during winter time as all the places outside were very cloudy, so we had to use an awful lot of post production that we didn’t intend to use in the beginning!
The film is about immigration. We were, or became, one of those people coming to London to find work by working on this film and being involved in the project.”
We were lucky enough to chat to a Reel office favorite – the mighty Quayola (featured in last months issue) about his piece “Rome” and how the concept, visuals and feel came together in his work :
“In a way the fact that I’m Italian and that I’m from Rome its quite obvious the relationship between me and the sort of iconic piece of art and architecture (in the film). Its contextualizing those icons that makes the piece…. It’s a sort of deconstruction of those icons to the point that they become something else. In a way it makes you see those icons at a different angle, in a hyper real way.
This is a project that I’ve been bringing forward for a while and if you go to my site and see my work you can see that. There are a few projects that I have been working on for quite a long time and this submission, this opportunity, me was a chance to bring forward my own research and this exploration of these icons. The theme is quite obvious but its more my work that fits in the theme rather than the other way around.
I’m definitely happy about this – it took quite a while to get these projects together and in the meanwhile I have been doing other projects for Onedotzero and stuff and projects of my own. I had some exposure at MTV in Italy but obviously to have such big exposure on MTV internationally… that is something I’m looking forward to! I don’t know!”
The Bloom Project work is being broadcast worldwide on the MTV network and are available to view online at http://www.mtvonedotzero.com/. We are also featuring the spots in the upcoming issue of The Reel.
Thanks to Shane and Donna for inviting us to a brilliant event and letting us chat to the artists involved.
