THE ARTS BOARD FOR CARDBOARD

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  • CGC: Computer Generated Cardboard

    CGC: Computer Generated Cardboard

    Some animation are worth looking at frame by frame. Psyop is one of the big names in animation. They are well known for big commercial projects that bring back the Awwww in awesome. They make computer generated animations without the “cgi-feel”. This is about the series of animations they made for UPS using cardboard as the main material. To give it the real cardboard look and feel they needed to reproduce cardboard in 3d. They didn’t only want to deal with the texture but also with all other properties of cardboard: how it tears, what the edges look like, the flexibility of it. This results in a 3d movies that sometimes makes you think that you’re watching stopmotion footage of cardboard figures! There’s a great interview on Motiongrapher by Brandon Lori with Technical Director and Project Lead Tony Barbieri.
    “From the start Eben Mears, our director, wanted the spot to look like it was created with miniatures. With that in mind I wanted to rig the characters in a very believable manner, to really emphasis the possibility of them being “real”. To do that, we had to build the characters in a way that they would be built if were we were going to actually create real miniatures.”

    Another fun fact: they used flash (which was once my favorite animation tool) for the crowds in the Gladiator scene… Makes me feel like less of a looser that even people like that still use flash 🙂

    via:http://motionographer.com/features/psyop-in-depth-with-tony-barbieri/

  • It even works, hi to lo-fi

    It even works, hi to lo-fi

    Make things big: size definitely matters amongst the cardboarding community :-). This Giant Cardboard Camera isn’t only beautiful, it also works! Kiel Johnson’s cardboard sculpture of a twin lens reflex camera is made strictly from cardboard, hot glue, and tape.

    It looks fast, forceful and playful even though you feel he probably works his fingers to the bone to make these things! After a while every cardboardista makes a robot. I think it’s because cardboard is box shaped most of the times, and robots are too. Kiel Johnson: “There’s just something about seeing yourself and a machine combined to a robot”. The robot project is a collab between Kiel Johnson, Arthur Mor, Roger LA, and Cypress College Art.

    You can find some pictures that are made with the camera on the site of Kiel Johnson, he has some SERIOUS cardboard skills. Normally I really don’t care for realism (some artists out there just try to copy reality in to cardboard, now why would you want to do that?). But Kiel Johnsons work has a sort of graffiti feel to it.

    The cardboard camera movie is filmed by Theo Jemison. Who also made the little gem underneath. This work reminds me of the film Science of Sleep by Michel Gondry. The quality of this picture is breathtaking. He uses all sorts of lenses and the movie is shot with the canon 5d. Using high tech camera’s to film how a extremely low tech camera is made. It’s complicated 🙂

  • Mechanics

    Mechanics

    Cardboard Mechanics is made by 4 students of the Utrecht School of Art and Technology (Saskia Freeke, Fin Kingma, Davy Jacobs and Sonja van Vuure). I love the endresult of the project but you should also check the other movies made during prototyping, they don’t have the audio mixed out and you can hear the sound of the cardboard as it spins and the sounds of the people looking at it! Next to making things by hand they also use of the laser-cutter. Laser cutting is a technique that has always been rather expensive to use. Thanks to the Fablabs that start to pop up in several cities around the globe a lot more people gained access to these (and many other) technologies. I’m not sure if they made this in a Fablab but there is one in Utrecht so they probably did 🙂 If you have one in your neighbourhood you should really check it out because it’s a nice initiative and a great way to be able to use very advanced technology for a small price!

  • Of Mice and Man (And of Cardboard too)

    Of Mice and Man (And of Cardboard too)

    The beautifull work of Richard Derks. Al sorts of little dwellings for his mice. Be sure to als watch the little films he made of the mice playing in the houses : Muizenhuizen (Micehouse) (update: at the moment these seem to be offline!)

    When you look at these little houses with the mice in it you’ll probably start to think about what it would be like to be a mouse. It also reminds of childhoods filled with building huts and treehouses and it also makes you think of Constant Nieuwenhuis’ Babylon

    I think that’s about enough to go have a look 🙂

  • Cardboard Applause Machine

    Cardboard Applause Machine

    Or maybe a rain machine… I would love to have seen this installation. It’s like an arena with people applauding it. If you’ve seen it live please share what it was like in real live 🙂

    made by hanneszweifel.ch and zimoun.ch
    It’s well wurth the applause!

  • Why this is a typically Dutch Blog

    Why this is a typically Dutch Blog

    The dutch have a broad history in cardboard and paper. The dutch city of Groningen used to be the capitol cardboard producer of the Netherlands, this is an old dutch song about them by Doctorandus P. I”ll try to translate a little of it using my worst english 🙂

    They do it with cardboard,
    cardboard, They do it with cardboard,
    Usually in the shed but if the weather is nice also on the lawn,
    This kind of work started in 1870
    It’s true, they told me

    If you happen to talk to the people of Oost-Groningen
    In their modest houses… or else on the street
    You”ll see, how people live and suffer here
    And for example how they eat breakfast

  • Cut me some Costumes

    Cut me some Costumes

    Poor animation with poor storytelling. The only good thing about Transformers was of course their ability to… TRANSFORM. This blog is not about copying existing ideas or making real life things out of cardboard. It’s about being original. But still… these costumes are made of cardboard and they are robots, and some of them even transform. So that raises awesomeness levels to great heights. Long live all of you girls and boys who like to dress up as  robots! Don’t let money change you!
    link to makers of picture: http://monkey5studios.com/

  • Tribal Jewellery Display

    Tribal Jewellery Display

    Just give us a load of material and we”ll make something! That’s what we said when the CODA museum asked us to make a jewelry presentation… No question, cardboard took over the show. The show took place during the holland papier bienalle. We got 50 big plates of cardboard en decided to go make a cardboard tribe of gorilla-esque figures: this the result!

  • BOXWARS ARE NO PILLOWFIGHTS

    BOXWARS ARE NO PILLOWFIGHTS

    Remember pillow fights? Alright: Now Forget Pillow Fights! If you feel like having fun you should try this for a weekend. Cardboard enthusiasts LET OUT THE CARDBOARD BEAST in a phenomenon called BOXWARS. It’s aggressive and creative at the same. Like a mixture between art and sport. There’s people all over the world forming illustrious groups of cardboard engineers, actors and visual artists. What do they make in the end? Havoc, Mayhem. Boxwars.

    The best movies i found (till now) are made by BOXWARS. They do role playing games involving people dressing up in recycled cardboard and belting each other with cardboard weapons. “It’s sort of gone from there and now it’s a worldwide thing.” The roughness of it is inspiring. There seems to be a need for manual games, for the non digital way of working amongst these artists. The return of the tactile! All this instead of looking at a screen at a character that (at least for the biggest part) is designed by a guy at a desk. Game designers have the minds of gamers: they are bored. So this is the world they create for us: a world where everything is boring, everything works, everything is possible. Cardboard wars are far from boring: why is that? Probably because everything is real. 3D, Augmented or any other reality can never beat the real reality 🙂


  • Sketchy Catchy Cardboard Characters in Holland

    Sketchy Catchy Cardboard Characters in Holland

    Cardboard animations by dutch animator Sjors Vervoort. So everybody has probably seen these blu street art animations and thought: ” I really need to make something like that because it’s just so epic. These moments end (in my case at least) mostly with sitting down and thinking: “It will never be that cool…” Sjors Vervoort’s cardboard animation reminds me of BLU and it also makes me think: “Whatever I’ll make will never be that cool…”

  • Painted Cardboard Houses Japan

    Painted Cardboard Houses Japan

    The cardboard dwellings of homeless people in the Shinjuku Station in Tokyo were a 1990s phenomenon. If you go to the website cardboard-house-painting.jp/ about these cardboard houses you can still see some of the beautifull artworks some of the inhabitants made of their temporary shelters. The site is in japanese but if you feel poetic: you can aways count on google translate japanese-english:

    Cardboard-type settlement here before the Information Center has to plug in a cardboard reviews too many pieces.
    Kita Tokoro had weak instead of reinforcing the new cardboard.
    Going to disappear a little bit at a picture of a picture.
    This is a collaboration with residents in this.

    also a little information can still be found here: http://www.eyedia.com/gallery/paint/street_en.html

  • Cardboard boat building

    Cardboard boat building

    Live is but a dream! I was thinking of making my own cardboard boat so I googled how to. No surprise that there’s a lot of people out there already doing that. There’s even regattas and online tips and boatbuilding plans. Visually I found this site the most attractive. There’s a lot of interesting structures on it and some nice explanations on why and how they used the material… The shapes are beautifull, and the combination with the black numbers on it sometimes remind of old science fiction movies and modern art!