Spider City Funland

2011

Animation, Architecture, Film

The sun means nothing to us as we toil in our endless city beneath the wasted crusted of the earth. We dig toward the core forever. Here in the distant future nothing remains of your civilisation except the hallowed Trocadero Centre. It reigns with iron fists resculpting the world at will, its fecund imagination made flesh at the merest thought. Over aeons the Trocadero mutated into the spider-city Funland and set sail across the seas of the dread Canal Dwellers.
Whilst the Printerhead Wasps are fervently building, and the Catvatars are doing whatever it is Catvatars do, the spider-city Funland has almost arrived at the decaying House of Fish...

Spider City Funland

The sun means nothing to us as we toil in our endless city beneath the wasted crusted of the earth. We dig toward the core forever. Here in the distant future nothing remains of your civilisation except the hallowed Trocadero Centre. It reigns with iron fists resculpting the world at will, its fecund imagination made flesh at the merest thought. Over aeons the Trocadero mutated into the spider-city Funland and set sail across the seas of the dread Canal Dwellers.
Whilst the Printerhead Wasps are fervently building, and the Catvatars are doing whatever it is Catvatars do, the spider-city Funland has almost arrived at the decaying House of Fish...

JONAH - Artwork

These are a series of images, spaces and components that we have designed for our Jonah film.

Jonah is a story set in the fishing town of Zanzibar of a changing man in a changing town. Aggressive tourism sparked through Jonah's discovery of the world biggest fish has caused the town and himself to change beyond recognition. The town is now a glowing, tacky, money making, wildly opportunistic beach town, which has abandoned its original fishing roots. As an old man Jonah is ashamed of what his old fishing town has become and decides to hunt down the legendary fish and kill it, killing what it represents.

Jonah is written by Jack Thorne, produced by Ivana MacKinnon. Made in partnership with Film4, BFI, Channel4, Shine Films, Rubedo Studio, Warren Holder.
Artwork Copyright FactoryFifteen.

Architecture, Art Direction, Digital Art

2012
GAMMA

SYNOPSIS
In a post-nuclear future, when the earth is riddled with radiation, a new urban developer proposes to regenerate the cities back into civilisation. GAMMA sets out to stabilise the atomic mistakes of yesteryear for the re-inhabitation of future generations. Using its patented 'Nuke-Root' technology; part fungi, part mollusc, GAMMA intends to soak up the radiation and remove it from the irradiated cities, rebuilding them in the process.

Setting out from Baikonur, Kazakhstan, GAMMA launches its RIG_01 BETA and heads east to the iconic disaster sites of 1980's USSR. The film follows a group of researchers investigating GAMMA's practice from launch to deployment. Moving through a trail of unsuccessful ships across the desert, we follow the researchers from Aralsk's littered sea bed east to the Ukraine.

GAMMA begins its quest of nuclear stability in the Ukraine; Pripyat is used as a test bed for the deployment of GAMMA's patented 'Nuke-root' organisms. Intended to soak up the radiation, the roots infiltrate the ground and built structures to absorb the ‘nuclear nasty's'. As with many urban developers, GAMMA's execution is cheap and ineffective. The city is in turn rendered more radioactive, broken and uninhabitable than before, only now with an outbreak of growing 'Nuke-roots'. The film follows the researchers through the ruins of the 70's utopia, moving across a whole city that consists solely of desolation and total abandon, the researchers witness the aftermath of GAMMA's almighty cock-up.

GAMMA was filmed in the Ukraine and Kazakhstan in association with the Unknown Fields Division.

Film, Animation

2012
LONDONS

Londons is a instilational piece made for the Samsung UK flagship store in Westfields Shopping Centre. We were commissioned to design and create a vast 5.5m by 2.5m mural which would be the base for 3 of their brand new near edgeless TV's, within which we animated part of the image which fell within the screens. The result is the effect of the TV's bringing the image to life.

Londons creates 2 worlds apart in the same city. Based in a near future the project explores the development of the 'hyper capital' and the suburban 'favelas'. Both exist to metophorically and stylistically oppose the other.

Within the TV's we animated the buildings, foliage, wind farms and created weather changes, all of which added to the effect.

The concepts explored in this piece are illustrative of a film project in development for 2012.

Architectural photography by Simon Kennedy
www.simonkennedy.net

Architecture, Visual Arts, Installation Design

2012
Robots of Brixton

Brixton has degenerated into a disregarded area inhabited by London's new robot workforce - robots built and designed to carry out all of the tasks which humans are no longer inclined to do. The mechanical population of Brixton has rocketed, resulting in unplanned, cheap and quick additions to the skyline.

The film follows the trials and tribulations of young robots surviving at the sharp end of inner city life, living the predictable existence of a populous hemmed in by poverty, disillusionment and mass unemployment. When the Police invade the one space which the robots can call their own, the fierce and strained relationship between the two sides explodes into an outbreak of violence echoing that of 1981.

Film, Animation, Character Design

2011
GOLDEN AGE - SOMEWHERE

Within 'Somewhere' We are transported to a time where the boundaries between what is real and what is simulated are blurred. We live online and download places to relax, parks and shopping malls. We can even interact with our friends as if they were in the same room with simulated tele-presence. Everyone is connected and immersed in nanorobotic replications of any kind of object or furnishings, downlodable on credit based systems. Distance and time become as alien as the 'offline' The local becomes the global and the global becomes the local. Consumer based capitalism has changed forever. A truly 'glocolised' world. The singularity is near.

The film places us into this vision, observing an average inhabitant within the ever changing environment of the latest SimuHouse. From a painting to a park and from a telephone call to a shopping mall. That is until there is a leek in the system and everything malfunctions. The film concludes with the house being forced to reset, giving the character and viewer a stark reminder that nothing is 'real' even her dog, which re-materialises in front of her.

CREDITS:

Directed By: Paul Nicholls
3D, 2D, Tracking, Post Production, Compositing, Camera Work: Paul Nicholls
Cast: Indre Balestuta, Iffy
Sound Design: Jesse Rope
Narration: Robert Leaf
Greek Vocal Talent: Lia Loanniti
Serbian Vocal Talent: Mina Micevic
Store Voice: Guillaume Nyssens
System Voice: Anita Shim
Music By: Kourosh Dini, Twighlight Archive, Pete Berwick

OFFICIAL SELECTION: Onedotzero, Alphaville

Architecture, Film, Animation

2011
BULB

Bulb is a short fiction set in both virtual and physical space.
Bulb explores the notion of time through spatial conditions.
Bulb questions the actual and the imaginary synthesising impossibilities alongside reality.

Computer Animation, Film, Animation

2011
GOLDEN AGE - THE SIMULATION

WINNER: BEST ARCHITECTURAL ANIMATION 2011.

Memory is a fleeting thing, often constructed with fragments of objects and places in a nonsensical arrangement in the mind. Golden Age - Simulation attempts to visualise this development of memory from the very abstract to the construction of whole environments in a single strand of memory (translated as one long camera shot).

The abstract concepts explored in this short, developed into a film about simulated reality, which can be seen in our project 'Golden Age - Somewhere'.

Directed and Produced By Paul Nicholls.

Architecture, Film, Animation

2011
FACTORY FIFTEEN SHOWREEL

A Collection of our finest, most sureal animations and images produced in 2011.

Film, Animation, Architecture

2011
MEGALOMANIA

Megalomania perceives the city in total construction. The built environment is explored as a labyrinth of architecture that is either unfinished, incomplete or broken. Megalomania is a response to the state of infrastructure and capital, evolving the appearance of progress into the sublime.

Film, Animation, Architecture

2011
MORPHOTIC MULTIPLICITY

Architecture is concerned with the needs of the static but has delved in concepts of multiplicity since the ornamental grandness in the baroque and rococo styles. This architecture was designed to be dynamic, to invoke movement and flow and harmony. Although the architecture itself did not move the eye would move through its undulating curves, the mind would transcend the body in the translation of form. The gold graphic of the substance in my film reflects and represents this history of ornamental multiplicity.

Morphotic Multiplicity is both propositional and representational, abstract and literal. It is deliberately open ended to give multiple directions of explorations into the uncertain, and proposes that harmony of form is achieved in the infinity of the dynamic form, or form of forms.

Film, Animation

2011
ROYAL RE-FORMATION

In an age of progressively automated manufacturing and fabrication processes, the Royal Cabinets are an aggressive expression of labour. Assembled from a contractor led design approach, the cabinets draw on highly skilled local craftsmen and artists to produce the fantastical. Staged within the proposed baron 'facadescape' of a financially fragile Canary Wharf, the Cabinets are programmatically charged with the loss of yet another great British labour force, Royal Mail.

Two ideas of labor are therefore existing in parallel. The capitalist driven one that we experience everywhere in the West, and the accomplishment of public service in a building that recounts its essence by its architecture.

Film, Architecture, Animation

2011
Speculative Landscapes

Speculative Landscapes is a short animation that digitally reconstructs a train journey evolving the environments that it travels through into a suggestive re-representation of the existing and possible future.

Computer Animation, Film, Virtual World Design

2011
Ministry of Fire

"The Elephant and Castle regeneration programme was incrementally postponed and amended due to financial and organisational problems. Whilst the local residents awaited plans for improvement in the infrastructure The Elephant was left to rot. The Shopping Centre suffered a severe fire causing vast destruction, incapacitating it from commercial inhabitation. The regeneration of the site was no longer desirable for commercial redevelopment, but became prime real estate for the expansion of a Pentecostal denomination.

The Shopping Centre has been transformed via a series of evangelical events, using fire as a construction strategy a new religious entity has grown from within The Elephant; The Ministry of Fire."

Computer Animation, Virtual World Design, Film

2011
PASTNESS PROJECTION

Pastness Projection represents a character who has constructed his environment with memories of the past. Frustrated with the lack of value in the simulated world he reconstructs objects and images as well as fractured memories of spaces which mean something to him.

Architecture, Film, Animation

2011