Vimeo Festival Awards

I’ve always been an admirer of Vimeo. To be sure the hosting, high definition content and video player are great but there’s something about the Vimeo experience which has always attracted the creative community, from traditional filmmakers to motion graphics animations, the site is over flowing with some quality content.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted a link to a fairly conventional site but I really like the way that the Vimeo 2010 Awards site has been put together. It’s simple and clean with some really nice details such as the colour coordinated categories. At first glance you just see these coloured thumbnails on the homepage but once you click though to them or explore the site some more you realise that they represent different types of work, such as green for experimental, pink for narrative, purple for motion graphics and so forth. Each video has a coloured ribbon on it to remind you of the category that you’re looking at and the overall winner has a rainbow coloured ribbon to represent that it’s the overall winner from all the categories.

There are a few problems here and there. The blog is hosted on tumblr and although they’ve done a good job of making the template look like the main site the navigation bar at the top is not in the same font size as on the main site nor is it in the same order.  The right hand column also shifts sizes quite a lot across the various pages and some of the left column headers are not aligned to the right column headers which creates an odd gap on the left of the page (such as on the press page).

Still as a fairly functional site which will have a short life span I like the look and feel that they’ve came up.

Gregory Crewdson

I’ve been a long time admirer of the work of Gregory Crewdson whose photography shows the inexplicable and often disturbing events that take place in suburbia.

His work reminds me of the films of David Lynch in the way that he takes suburbia and rips it open to show the dark, uncompromising weirdness that goes on behind closed doors.

Unlike Lynch however Crewdson has no back story to his characters or a resolution at the end of 90 minutes. When you look at his photos you simply see a captured moment in an unknown life. You have no idea how everyone ended up where they are. Why the couple seems so depressed or why the woman is staring at her baby.

I always end up transfixed by the amount of care and attention in his photos. The lighting, the clothing, the tint of a head, the shadows, the objects on the dresser, everything has been carefully arranged to create this distributing feeling.