Brand New School Creates Design to Reflect CS3 Apps

In March, Adobe made the biggest release in the company’s history. Last week it made a splash in Manhattan as it unveiled an interactive installation designed by directing collective Brand New School to illustrate the power and diversity of each of its many design tools.
The 25-foot wide by 10-foot high projected screen, using of course Adobe Flash as the player, features a myriad of layers of graphic animation that are triggered by the viewer’s movements, from side to side and as they get closer to the screen. As the person tracked by the sensor gets to the far right of the screen the animation builds in intensity and then displays the tagline: Creative license: Take as much as you want.

The task of creating the design for the installation, and in doing so encapsulating all the various design styles and techniques possible with the CS3 apps, was awarded to the directing collective Brand New School, via agency Goodby, Silverstein & Partners. Obscura Digital worked with Adobe developing the mechanism for tracking the viewer to synch the animation with their movement.

We spoke with Brand New Schools’ creative director/founder Jonathan Notaro and producer Devin Brook about how they tackled such a large and nebulous project.

STUDIODAILY: How did you have to change your approach to this project that has no beginning, middle and end?
JONATHAN NOTARO: There was always a randomness inherent in this project that everyone wanted to maintain. We usually design things in fairly linear way. This one was more motivated by the software and the variation in aesthetics. Not only did you want to get across the different crafts that the CS3 point to, but you also want to have a collection of different design voices in there. You have to find a way, maybe with the animation, maybe with the coding, but you have to find a way for all those media and elements to clash and embrace the experimental aspect of it.

I understood that fairly early on as a creative director I had to let go a little. It is a Brand New School project but it should feel very different than anything we’ve ever done before. Part of that is letting people play a lotand see what comes of it. There was still sort of a design formula to it. Like all projects we had a design ethos at the beginning but whether you can detect that same thing at the end doesn’t really matter.

What did you present to the agency and client during your pitch?
JN: We just had conversations with the client and agency. Everyone that pitched for the job just had conversations. Adobe was looking for an experimental aspect to it. When they were asking us to do it the appeal to our pitch seemed to be that it wasn’t too heavy on one medium or style and represented a wider gamut of design voices and aesthetics.

What was the initial design phase entail?
JN: It’s a strange thing [as a designer], you have to soak it up and re-find your voice a little bit and then tap into others. I think what [Adobe and Goodby, Silverstein & Partners] were looking for more than anything is just picking peoples brains and getting a lot of different styles in there. We had a bunch of things inspired by After Effects, then more Illustrator type work and a Photoshop approach and then all these worlds would explode and clash.

Within that there are three things: aesthetics, pointing to the applications and how things move in these applications, and also having a variety of movement within those movements. So you might have to have some crude stop motion stuff next to some smooth, languid, code-driven Flash stuff.

DEVIN BROOK: We defined some parameters early on. We tried to think of everything you would use After Effects for and made a list. And we made a list for each of the applications. For InDesign we’re going to have something that points to typography, page layout and editorial design. How that displays and animates, who knows. Maybe it’s a simple grid that gets more and more complex with some type-play.

The design had to be successful from the very simple state to its more evolved, complex state. So there had to be this continuity from simplicity to complexity. We didn’t want the moment the sensor picks the viewer up there is this explosion of design. We wanted it to build.

JN: Once we had this visual formula – certain things would be forms, other things were explosions, there would be flora, patterns, these little sprites that pop up, more type-driven stuff, some film driven stuff ‘ we built that up and then started removing elements that were doing the same thing. There was a fairly tight budget on it, or rather tight timeframe, so we couldn’t take forever designing it.

Everything was designed in Illustrator, Photoshop, After Effects or Flash, or drawn and scanned. Then that was brought into the various Flash and we looked at all those elements and thought about when the animations would go over to The Studio for Interactive Media, which did all the scripting. Sometimes we just gave them artwork that they’d re-create using code. Or they’d take that artwork and plug it into Flash.

Talk about the technical challenges of this project.
JN: So much of the approach was a technical problem. We were really interested in putting as much as we could into [the installation] but at a certain point, on a project this large, the technology kind of chokes. So you had to have all these design styles happening simultaneously under these tight technical limitations and it takes a lot of experimentation and it became a lot more technical at that point.

Our designs were handed over to a few very inventive action-based scripters at The Studio of Interactive Media. One of the partners is more code-driven and the other is more design driven and those guys were perfect for the project in order to make sure it could all work in Flash. We animated the stuff that made sense for us to do, like the After Effects animation and the photo driven material, which didn’t make sense to try and do in code.

Adobe had been working with Obscura Digital on hardware for the mechanism. This type of technology has been out there for a while, mostly in installations and trade shows.

DB: The technology is similar to that of when you go to a Flash Web site and mouse over it. So you could test it on your computer. But a good amount of the testing went into how detailed you could get with the capture [of the viewer] information, and how detailed you can get with the animation, without the processors going nuts and start chugging. At a certain point when you are projecting something this large, at this resolution, with that many animations happening on top of each other with that many different types of media, so in the realtime aspect of putting that all together, you have to err on the side of caution. At the end we had to get rid of some stuff or rethink things and we were a little disappointed that we had to change it. But displaying 2K size images with this many layers in realtime, well, is kind of crazy.

We used a variety of frame rates depending on what the processor could handle. We put more and more in until it started to chug, so then we’d scale the frame rates back, making decisions depending if it was supposed to look like stop motion or completely smooth. We hovered around 24fps as a base.

What is your opinion of this interactive installation as a medium?
JN: It’s new to advertising but not new to installations. Architecture firms have been doing this for years. Bloomberg had an interactive presentation over a year ago that was very good and there’s a whole section of graphic designers that are into the interactive media with installations and architectural design-type applications.

JN: With a project like this, it is so much fun that maybe it becomes more of an orthodox advertising medium.

CREDITS
Agency: Goodby, Silverstein & Partners

Design and Animation: Brand New School, New York
Director: Jonathan Notaro
Art Director: Eli Carrico, Danny Ruiz
Designers: Serge Kirsanov, Victor Lau, Mitch Paone,
Michael Perry, Adam Wentworth
3d Artists: Camila Benitez, Anton Tokar
Producer: Devin Brook
2d Animators: Chace Hartman, James O'Brien, James Webber
Executive Producer: Danny Rosenbloom

Interactive Development: The Studio for Interactive Media
Co-Founders: Justin Bakse, Eric Ishii Eckhardt
Interactive Designer: Greg Schomburg
Production: Rachel Morris

Projection Technology & Set-Up: Obscura Digital