Newart.City
New Art City is a virtual gallery & exhibition toolkit for digital art.
Newart.City is a platform for artists to host their shows and artwork on a virtual space anywhere in the world. I had a great opportunity to intern with them and work as a Motion-Product & Graphic Designer.
The Experience.
At NAC, I worked with the co-founders, video team (Noor Bondogji, Matteo Leva, Yeab Kebede, Van Nguyen and Umika Mathur), and creative director to work on a few videos and create teasers for featured artists. As a motion graphics designer, I was responsible in creating intro stills graphics for usage in future videos. This video is for the artist, Andrew Blanton, and his show “Antiphon." This show is about creating tunes through a built software (Max MSP) at a different location and hosting it online where everyone can hear the organic tunes.
ANTIPHON is a networked, interactive, real time, audiovisual performance environment exploring the conceptual framing of Antiphonal music. The instruments are networked and act as volumetric sound sculptures built to be performed live. They are controllable via remote server creating a networked, highly accurate, audiovisual representation distributed across all participant's web browsers. - Show Debut; March 21st, 2021
The video team and I created the intro stills and were invited to the show on NAC to record the walkthrough of the show. We then put the video together into an artist introduction trailer. It was a pleasure to work with Andrew and learning about his process through this show.
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Date.
Feb. - May 2021
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Role.
Creating mo-graph. stills for artists and New Art City.
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Deleverables.
Newart.City, Discord, Blender, Adobe Premiere, and YouTube.
The Process.
The process of designing and creating motion graphics, interviewing artists, and trailers took 6 months over all. The motion graphics took between a week to 2 weeks to create.
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Understand.
Before any design, understanding comes first! The video team and I, had to understand who/what is NAC all about, what their mission is, and what their site theme is all about before creating any prototype. One way to help us understand how everything works, is exploring NAC’s featured artists, learn about their shows and get a visual sense of what we should stick to, and what we can create.
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Ideate.
After exploring NAC, we conducted an interview with Andrew and other artists and started sifting for key answers that would help our teaser trailers and NAC. This helped us get more creative on what to design and really hone down on key themes for each artist we interviewed.
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Decide.
The first prototype was a motion graphic intro still that has wave blob form moving with colors that matched the NAC “Festival” show colors. This was created in Blender and Adobe Premiere. The Ceo and Cofounders did not approve due to wanting to keep their image about the artist who is the focal point and keeping everything simple to showcase the artist rather than the focal point on the intro/outro stills.
This animation took me a week to create and render through Blender.
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Protype II.
After the first prototype, I decided to create a moodboard of what NAC design visuals are. This helped my team and I to create the same theme with what NAC wanted which were simple, and plexus shapes.
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Prototype III.
I created another motion graphics that caters more to the design on NAC’s site. This was designed with the NAC’s logo in mind which is a plexus ionosphere.
The Plexus took me 2 days to create in Blender and 3 days to update and fix any requests made by the creative director.
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Prototype 4.
After designing a rough draft of the intro, Yeab and I drafted a visual of how the background should look like when interviewing artists in the intro still.
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Prototype 5.
Before submitting the final product, Matteo drafted up music examples of what will be used in the trailer from different artists.
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Test - Final Result.
This intro:outro still was designed in Blender and Adobe Premiere by Van Nguyen, Noor Bondogji, Matteo Leva, and Umika Matthur.
Plexus Effect.
One of the prototypes I designed for the intro/outro stills was this plexus effect loop. It was created in Blender and rendered out in 1920 x1080. This took me a week to design and update any design requests made by the team. The design was inspired by NAC’s logo which is an ionosphere shape.
Final Result.
This was the final result that we tested on Andrew Blanton’s show on NAC. The plexus effect is in the background with a hover fade over it to take away the focal point from the artists name and show.
The plexus and trailer took almost a month to design and edit with Blender and Adobe After Effects.
Challenge.
One of the challenges for me was editing the best portions of our interviews and b-roll that fit what Newart.city’s vision was. Since there is lots of amazing footage to use, it was hard to narrow down our choices.
Solution.
What helped me and my team was to set questions that helped us find the answers in the interview edits. We decided on 4-5 essential questions that caters to NAC’s design, motive, and message.
Newart.City Artists Interview.
By the end of my internship, I learned how to plan with a team as a project manager, how to design motion graphics as mo-graphics designer, and strengthen my communication skills that helped me build a network with my team, CEO, and artists. I also made some great friends along the way that I learned from and can’t wait to practice and apply those skills in the future!
This interview was conducted and created by the NAC's video team -- Noor Bondogji, Matteo Leva, Yeab Kebede, Van Nguyen, and Umika Mathur.
