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We're stopping our blog, but planning other things in the blogosphere.

There are better ones out there that do a similar thing. Here are a few of our favourites:

It's Nice That
seiz whaa?
CR Blog
Can't Meme, Won't Meme

You can find us on Twitter as @nickbrad and @juleshunt for stuff we like, and we'll still be doing Soup as our online scrapbook.

Everything will be okay.

Crystal Fighters Promo

It's been a long time coming, but the new video for the Crystal Fighters' debut single 'Xtatic Truth' on Kitsune finally made it to YouTube today.

Thom and Eoin asked me to art direct the promo.

Sam Hicks

Sam Hicks is a photographer who we were lucky to do a bit of work with last year and hope to again.



It's the last week (and a bit) of his show in the Lanes in Brighton at the Crane Kalman gallery, so if you're there any time between now and the 19th of July and have had enough of seagulls and or just other people generally, go and see his work on huge C-Prints. Or buy one, like Will Young did.




It's not just that he shoots nails-looking dudes on bikes and lonely-looking molls in motels, but it's his lighting: David Lynch meets Wim Wenders meets Lawrence G. Paull meets John Seale.

2 Many VJs

Last Saturday I nipped down to Brixton to catch 2 Many Djs do a gig at the Academy. Not only did they musically smash the back out of the night, they had an awesome VJ set that accompanied the Djing. For every tune they mixed in, it's artwork animated and was projected behind them as they played. A really simple idea that worked very well.

I'm not 100% sure the tracks were on DVD and they were mixing with VDJs, but it's possible. Either way, the boys done good.



The clearest example of the graphics I could find from the night.



Manchester, not Brixton, but showing a transition between two tracks.

Image Digging

A healthy portion of our spare time is taken up sifting through sites looking for images and video that tickle our taste buds. I'm not talking about the god-awful task of sourcing images for spec work. This is enjoyable brain sponging.

If you've got any bit of a collector in you, it can be little addictive. Time disappears and eyes get sore whilst you're on the hunt. So we thought we'd feed the habit, get all image pusher on you, and give our Google Readers a shake, see what falls out.

But first, we should start with Soup, a tumbler website that aggregates the stuff you find on the web. You can set it to automatically load images, links, quotes and video from all of your other sites, but we like a bit more control, so we manually post using the upload tool that sits in the task bar. Virtual scrapbook-tastic. Check ours.

Links: (Some old faves to kick off with).

Ffffound
Follow a trail of recommended images fffforever and ever and ever.

Flickr
No longer just a collection of wannabe photographers work. We've stumbled upon some amazing collections of models, posters, typography, even some nostalgic trading cards. Plus now it's got video.

Vimeo
Youtube's fit cousin.

CRBlog
Standard.

Lens
The New York Times' photography, video and visual journalism.

GigaPica
The best of international photojournalism.

Seiz Whaa?
"A space for the occasional brainfarting or just random flim flam from the interweb."

Yimmy's Yayo
"Visual crack for the ocular fiend."

Bad Bannana Blog
"Ideas, inspiration, ephemera. Put 'em in the freezer and bake some bread later."

Cool Hunting
Does what it says on the tin.

Ectoplasmosis
Silly on the surface, deadly serious content though.

Geekologie
"Gadgets, gizmoes and awesome."

It's Nice That
Quality creative industry sampling, whatever it may be.

Made In England
Cookie is a man, this is his blog.

Monster Munch
Sock monster maker and collector of cool.

Grain Edit
Retro looking loveliness.


Oh, and if you do need to do a bit of specific image searching, we haven't found a tool that beats Cool Iris.
Check it out, it's like Minority Report.

Mother Goes Pop

It was bound to happen sooner or later - no Shoreditch space is complete unless it has some trendy art hanging on it's walls. So Mother add to their adventures outside of advertising by turning their reception and canteen area into a fully fledged art gallery. They're titling it Downstairs, and last night was the opening of a Peter Blake retrospective.

This hasn't been the first exhibition in the space, (previous experiments have included Martin Parr and Anthony Burrill & Michael Marriott) but it was officially the first opening of Downstairs, and a very swanky affair it was too. Apart from the legend himself, we noticed Dawn from East Enders and Harry Hill supping on the free culture.



Look there's thingy-me-jig

Along with the exhibition starting, Mother have launched the CCA Art Bus. It was parked outside last night, and in a lot of ways, is a cooler idea than the gallery opening itself. It's upper deck is an art space, while it's lower is an educational space. Yesterday Peter Blake bombed about in it, stopping at various pop art monuments and picking up relevant celebs along the way. In the future it will drive to British schools with the aim of introducing children to the visual arts.

CCA Art Bus



CCA Art Bus

Noel Fielding kills people with a big pointy stick

Checked this the other day, it's well good....



... it reminded me of the awesomeness of this guy's work...



You know how horror films now are mostly really crap, well Dario Argento was a genius when it came to keeping you perched on the edge of your Chesterfield. And he managed to do it with style and the freakiest soundtrack to boot.

Argento cut his teeth working in a particular type of Italian thriller genre called Giallo. A term that translates as "yellow". It's taken from the colour of the covers of the pulp sexy gore fiction novels, a lot of the films in the genre were based on. But, it was his move into the supernatural with films like Suspiria, Inferno and Phenomena, and his teaming up with the mighty, freaky prog rock band, The Goblins that got me drawing the comparisons.

Rather than gush about an aging Italian, that is, unfortunately well past his movie making prime, I urge you to check out his two masterpieces, Profundo Rosso and Suspiria.

In the meantime, have a gander at The Goblins: soundtrack- ers to the 70s horror.

(fans of Justice will recognise the hook sampled from the theme from Tenebrae).

Haunch Of Venison Host Tasty Exhibition - Mythologies

I have vague memories of visiting the Museum of Mankind as a child. One image that remains strong is the shadow puppets they had on display. The 2D characters with weird faces and limbs fascinated me. They had an other-worldliness that slightly creeped me out but kept me looking on. And it's this feeling that comes back to me as I push though the door of 6 Burlington Gardens. This is where Haunch of Venison Auction House is holding it's Mythologies exhibition, and where the Museum of Mankind once was before it went off to join the British Museum.



Tracked down this shadow puppet performance from Indonesia.


Through the show they've created a giant cabinet of curiosities that echoes the old museum and shows off the Victorian building to it's best. There's a lot of weird and wonderful stuff here to check out, but it's not all quality curio. This might be due to the fact that it's an exhibition that's curated by an auction house, so you sometimes get the impression their artists work has been crow-barred into the theme.

All in all though, some top work from some of the industries contemporary heavy weights.

Here's some of my picks from the show:



Tim Noble and Sue Webster, get rude with shadows on their Wall of Shame.





The anatomically correct skeletons of Sylvester and Tweety Pie, by Hyungkoo Lee.







Nice big photos of Damien Hirst's Skull. They had glass on the surface so it shimmered as you walked towards it.

Originally, a crystal skull took pride of place in the Museum of Mankind.



This image unfortunately doesn't do justice to Mat Collishaw's dead moths on scanner beds. The level of detail produced by high res scans and huge blowups resulted in something really beautiful.



Ed and Nancy Kienholz's, 76 J.C.s Led the Big Charade Christ bashing installation.



A "scartchy chin moment" over two hungry stuffed Dobermans (Jochem Hendricks, Siblings).





The guys in these photos believe their magical powers can turn bullets to water. Here they are cammi-ed up and ready to do battle, secure in their beliefs that they will escape unscathed.

I can't imagine they go up against many guns or else I think their faith in magic would've been seriously called in to question a while back.



Another stuffed dog. This time it's caught it's own tale. How cute.



And yet more taxidermy...Polly Morgan plays with the artform, celebrating the corpse as beauty instead of attempting to fake the animals mortality.

Cheery stuff eh?

Long Live Culture Jamming

Culture jamming, ad busting, or subvertising are three cruddy terms coined when the people who used to put up 48 sheet posters for Nike shoes got pissed off that the kids who would see those posters would barely be able to afford them. So they decided to put up fake ads that would have straplines like 'Just Do Something' and flaccid-looking swooshes.


But since foreign exchange students and rebellious teenagers on Oxford Street started buying those t-shirts with Adihash logos and reading Adbusters magazine felt a bit like you were being told off, we've not seen much that's made us laugh.


So we're pleased to see its return with the 'Taste The Failbow' skittlefisting blog, in response to the 'Interweb the Rainbow' online campaign for Skittles. Take that, adland.

Lightwriting

We've been dazzled by lightwriting lately, even though it's nothing new.

Wikipedia claims it's because 'With the abundance of computer generated special effects and motion graphics this practical approach to stop motion using light sources moving in the frame delights and perhaps confounds the techno-savvy modern viewer'.

We love how strange and unauthoritative that theory is for Wikipedia, so we're not going to disagree with it.

Here's a video from the future by German collective Lichtfaktor.


Forest from LICHTFAKTOR on Vimeo.

Online Resources

You inevitably have to do a lot of macing up as a creative.

We've bookmarked the following sites as ones we've found useful and that speed things up a bit, when you've got to spend some time developing CTS.

COMPFIGHT

Searches images on flickr. You can see loads of images at the same time and find the one you want more quickly.

TinEye

Image search engine that finds higher res versions of a particular image you have.

FFFFOUND!

Art direction inspiration.

Best Brands Of The World

High res logos.

dafont.com

Free fonts to download.

Photoshop Support Centre

Photoshop tutorials by Americans who all seem to have the same voice and speech mannerisms.

youSENDit

Send files up to 100 MB for free.

Spotify

Online jukeboxin'.

New Illustration

What with Tony Hart's recent passing away, we've been struggling to think who could inspire a nation of kids to pick up a pencil in quite the same way. Devotees of Tony Hart know that many rainy days can be happily spent with some A4 paper and a pencil, just drawing and making noises of whatever it is you're drawing.

We've picked out some of the best illustrators we've seen recently, who've made us reach for our Crayola.

Mario Hugo is very good with a pencil. And type. And making stuff look dribbly.






Chrissie Macdonald is very good with a bit of card and some double-sided tape.






And David Foldvari nails the whole black and white/scribbly thing.

Datamoshing

So it looks like we have a new visual-FX device.

I first saw this used in Becks's 'Youthless' video a few months back and wondered when it would rear it's ugly-beautiful head again. Takeshi Murata has been using it in his art for ages and the term "datamoshing" (the effect that fakes the glitches that happen when video is compressed) was first coined by the Youtuber, paperrad. But, no doubt, we'll now see it everywhere from Channel U to Hollywood, after Kanye's jumped on board.


KANYE WEST "Welcome To Heartbreak" Directed by Nabil from nabil elderkin on Vimeo.

Via Gui, cheers fella.


Beck “Youthless” from chickengang on Vimeo.

!WARNING THIS VIDEO CONTAINS FLASHING IMAGES!

Simian Mobile Disco - Synthesise.
Live Visual Performance.
Directed by Kate Moross & Alex Sushon.

(Blogger likes to crop Youtube vids that are wide, hence the click through.)

Bars and Tones, Andre Chocron

Aaaahhhh. Much sweeter than what I remember post production to be.

Kai and Sunny on a winter's evening

This Saturday I dodged the cold and stepped into the StolenSpace Gallery just off Brick Lane, London. Inside were intricate prints that warmed the soul.

Printed on canvas and paper, the batik-y folk feel of the work would normally have me running for the hills. But up close it was beautifully crafted. I couldn't help leave feeling a little lifted.

(Couldn't bring my cynical self to like the tee-pees though. Yuck).


More from the duo.

Tilt-shift time-lapse

You might have seen some tilt-shift photography before. It's mainly used to make stuff look like a teeny model.


What we haven't seen before, though, is tilt-shift photography being combined with time-lapse techniques.


Metal Heart from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.
Try it for yourself if you're feeling inspired, in an online version.

Say AR

In the 90s virtual reality was the thing that was dropping jaws. But interaction with the virtual world has moved on since then. With mouths agog, we've been checking out augmented reality (AR).



Simply put, AR is a field of research devoted to blending real and virtual environments. It's interactive in real time and registered in 3D space. And the virtual objects can be moved about, remain still, and interact with the real world.

The implications for the technology are vast. Ever wondered how they manage to paint the Barclay's Premiership logo on the pitch, then clean it off so quickly after the whistles blown. Now you know. Of course that's a simple application. Soon you'll be able to hold your camera phone up and see information linked to buildings and geography appear on it's sceen. Get a wriggle on TimeOut.

Gaming will be brought into the real world, virtual wallpapers will line the walls of homes and car sat nav will appear on windscreens. The holo-deck from Star Trek is not far off.

Of course there's plenty of room for fun. Click for last year's Specialmoves Christmas card.

Superbowl Ads 2009

Bit of a let down this year, even if they did air some porn to those watching at home. We picked this one as our favourite. It's an ad by Wieden + Kennedy Portland for jobs website Careerbuilder.com.



Here's a Ridley Scott anti-IBM Orwellian classic, from the time when people said 'Macintosh'.

The Wire

Senator Clay Davis in the best TV show since Twin Peaks. We love you and your drawn out expletives, Clay.

Catch Generation Kill, David Simon and Ed Burn's (creators of The Wire) new series currently on FX.

Comic

Here's a comic I did. The title translates as 'The Unlikely Consequences of Eating Books' and you can see the full version on flickr. I'll post a colour version soon.


We both like this man very much at the moment, too.

BUG 11

Last night we went to BUG 11 hosted by laugh-maker Adam Buxton at the BFI.



Best video of the night was zZz’s ‘Running with the Beast’, directed by Roel Wouters.



And this is how they did it.

WELCOME

This is our new and shiny blog. We'll be putting on lots.