I have to admit I have missed the starting talks on Tuesday morning. Not because I had too many drinks on Monday. I was just enjoying a chat with other attendees in the recharge area of the Brighton Dome. Some familiar faces from the party the night before, some unfamiliar, and a cup of coffee made a very pleasant start of the day. After that, I was torn between Florian Schmitt speaking about the importance of storytelling in interactive media and animator Cyriak Harris.
At the end I decided to go see Cyriak Harris. You might have seen his unique style in music videos he made for the likes of Bloc Party, Bonobo or Eskmo. Finally I had a chance to meet the man behind these baffling trippy animations and see his creative process. His weapon of choice is Adobe AfterEffects, which is in many ways the most complex software from Adobe’s broad portfolio. Although Cyriak might not be using all the newest functions of it, it was really interesting to see how he is bending the ways AfterEffects tools were designed to be used, and combines them to achieve such a unique result. And although he claims to have become an animator because he is lazy, there is an incredible amount of work behind his videos.
James White took the stage with thunder and lightning… and rainbows. This Canadian illustrator did 26 talks in the last year, which should give you an idea of what level of a speaker we are dealing with here. ‘The Journey, not the Destination’ was the name of his talk. He spoke about never putting down his sketchbook as a child, working on his own projects in the evenings and on the weekends while making his living in an agency day job and slowly getting some following online and being able to make his living as an illustrator. Every word of it proved how passionate he is about his craft! And it shows in the shear amount and quality of his work.
In the afternoon, when everybody gathered in the main theatre again, it all got a bit more techy, non the less creative though, with Brendan Dawes. A designer and artist exploring the interaction of objects, people, technology and art using an eclectic mix of digital and analog materials. He walked us through his ‘ugly’ experiments and prototypes, because ‘everything starts out ugly’. But some of them evolved into beautiful projects ranging from 3D printed data visualisations to little internet-of-things devices. For example The Happiness Machine or Mailchimp Sarah that notifies him every time he gets and email from the Reasons to be Creative organiser John Davey.
The only thing on the stage more colourful than FromForm’s tittle sequence set was Kate Moross. Young but experienced designer from London even brought one of her dogs to help her do Tuesday’s Inspired Session, which she oddly called Anti-Inspiration. Because besides hating Pinterest and Tumblr, she also hates being asked what inspires her. But to balance it out, she told us about her love of duct tapes, markers, candy wrappers and other things that come in many colours. Apparently, in Japan almost everything comes in many colours so Kate spoke a lot about her recent trip there. And if you are still wondering what inspires her to stay up late to make her work better or meet that deadline… it’s the same thing that inspires many other creatives. Pizza and beer!
We will be back soon with recap of the third and last day of the conference! In the meantime, you can follow @reasonsto!
