HIGHRISE One Millionth Tower

One Millionth Tower is the latest chapter in the ongoing NFB documentary series HIGHRISE. It was meant to be a six minute animated short, illustrating how a crumbling housing project in suburban Toronto could be transformed with the input of forward-thinking planners, architects and residents.

But then things got complicated.

Six months of feverish production later, and One Millionth Tower launches at Mozilla Festival in London. Featured by wired.com as the world’s first webGL-based interactive doc, One Millionth Tower blends together such digital tools as video, 3D modelling and textures, animation, sound and particle effects, social media, and weather channels, to create a surprisingly analog world.

One Millionth Tower is a technological first: an interactive documentary built with open-source HTML5 and a Web-based Graphics Library (WebGL). Made for the contemporary browser, it places you in the three-dimensional world of a run-down highrise neighbourhood, where you can interact with the environment and see it re-imagined as a lively, flourishing community.

Helios handled the technical research and development, javascript programming, webGL implementation and art direction.

Go and explore One Millionth Tower
You can learn more about how this project was made here.

“The makers of One Millionth Tower reinvented the documentary format…
…as close to three-dimensional as something on a flat screen can get.”
Angela Watercutter, wired.com

“Damned Cool”
Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing

“Watch This: Here’s how you make a documentary only using HTML5 and webGL graphics”
Adrian Covert, Gizmodo

La Société Stella Artois

La Société Stella Artois is an members-only society for those with a thirst for the beautiful life. We created an animation that introduces the society and explains what members can expect. The style of illustration is reminiscent of the early 1960′s, referencing Saul Bass, French travel posters, Réné Margritte and Hitchcock’s “To Catch A Thief”.

Helios Design Reel

BlackBerry “Super Apps”

Research In Motion wanted to demonstrate the concept of “Super Apps”; mobile applications that take full advantage of all of the BlackBerry’s features. We came up with four spots illustrating the differences between regular apps and Super Apps using humour and a surprisingly simplified animation style to get the message across.

The first spot deals with music, followed by

Shopping,

Sports,

and Business.

We created this epic video for the opening of a BlackBerry invite-only event. The screen was gigantic: 10ft. high and over 125ft. long and curved around the conference room. In order to deal with the bizzare aspect ratio we divided the screen into four panels and edited existing clips (as well as footage we shot) into a rhythmic collage. The final piece was projected by synchronizing four theater-format digital projectors.

You should really watch this in fullscreen if you want to make out any details.

Here are the initial storyboards, cut together from hundreds of source clips:

Mongrel Media Intro

Mongrel Media is one of Canada’s leading film distribution companies specializing in art house, foreign and independent feature films and documentaries.

Helios created a new title intro to be debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival. Slow motion footage of a running dog was stabilized, tracked and rotoscoped. The resulting footage was layered into a dynamic composition and treated to resemble the look of an animated oil painting.

Sound design by John Black at cypheraudio.

Here’s a short explanation of the process from start to finish:

The oil treatment of the footage was done by using software that allowed us to script custom paintbrushes and paint action sequences that automatically processed the video images.

While we ended settling on a stark monochrome approach, we scripted many different paint action sequences that looked astonishingly realistic. Here are couple of stills of the results: