Why I wrote RED?

Not too long ago I released a short animated film called 'RED'. The film follows a toy robot and his journey to the tree of life. RED falls in love with this idea of the tree as he sits directly opposite a painting of it. He is captivated by this painting and seeks to find it.

You may ask, since he's moving around and has feelings for this tree... clearly he must have some life in him, so why? why search for the tree? Well, I can't really give you a straight forward answer to this unfortunately. What I can say is that the film is in many ways a fairy tale, a fairy tale within the mind of a toy robot. Whether RED went on this journey or not even I cannot say, I'd personally like to think he didn't and it was all set in his mind, in the mind of a lifeless object.

So why? I guess I didn't realise it until recently but in many ways RED is based on every bit of wanderlust I have in my self. I sit at my desk all day creating fictional realities because I feel somewhat limited within mine.

For those of you who have seen the film Blade Runner by Ridley Scott

"I have… seen things you people wouldn't believe… Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those… moments… will be lost in time, like [small cough] tears… in... rain. Time… to die…" The film was quite heavily inspired by this one line, this idea of being more human than human in a sense. Being able to look beyond from where you are. All those memories that will eventually get lost or never heard by anyone. 

Whether the tree actually exists doesn't matter, RED is about our ability to escape from the world into something truly beautiful. We live routine lives and not often are we given this chance to "see things people wouldn't believe", we live robot lives almost everyday and we rely on escape, we rely on our minds a lot of the time. In many ways RED being a robot is a metaphor for routine, being trapped in a plastic body and not completely feeling human a lot of the time.

"don’t give yourselves to brutes - men who despise you - enslave you - who regiment your lives - tell you what to do - what to think and what to feel! Who drill you - diet you - treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men - machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men!" -Charlie Chaplin 

The tree represents our ability to dream, our goal. The journey is all the beauty our minds allow us to envision, it represents the amazing moments we do have while travelling to our goals, those brief moments of happiness. 

Essentially RED "dies" at the end of the film, he finds what he believes to be the tree of life. In all honesty I intentionally made the tree look incredibly different from the painting, my reasons being is that it was never the tree RED was searching for. Instead, it is the reality that we settle with until it's "time... to die...". Things will never be the way you imagine it in your head but sometimes the moments we settle for in our lives always feel like more.

If you haven't seen the film or just wanna rewatch it, here's the link; 
https://vimeo.com/94875483

Stay Caffeinated Guys,

Adeel

My interview at Cartoon Network

Soooooo! Today was a pretty big day for me. About two weeks ago I went to a university reunion with my friend Steven, here I was introduced by my teacher to an ex-student who did the same course as me. I was told she worked at Cartoon Network and they were looking for Junior Motion graphics designers. Whey. She passed on my work and within days I got an email from the senior designer asking for my CV. 

"No. Damn. Way." I thought to myself. I went home adjusted my cv to look super schmexy and bam it was gone. A day later I got another email inviting me to an interview. Interview was today. And well I don't even know what just happened. 

I personally feel like I didn't get the job due to my work being a bit too "filmic" but that's just me, in no way did they hint that in the interview. 

I was introduced to the senior designer and creative director. I was pretty much shitting myself but trying to look like I was pretty confident. 

They asked me about my background and were very heavily interested in my experience. Quite frankly they were more interested in my experience than my actual reel which I found odd but it must make sense to them. I began to explain my projects individually one by one to both of them and Yeh it was going okay. Until! 

I was suddenly asked "can you show us stuff you're particularly happy with in terms of typography?" 

Shit. Type and Adeel just don't go. Well it's more that I haven't completely learnt about it and not fully mastered. I literally only had two pieces of work that consisted of any sort of type and it just looked so bad and not up to par with my actual design work. 

They both watched my short film RED and were pretty impressed with the shots. The creative director said I have an eye for VFX and shots to which in my head I died a little. That was nice. Also! If you're reading this The Effect, Cartoon Network have seen the music video I did for you guys. Love me. LOL. 

Being my first professional interview it was a pretty interesting experience. I crapped myself the whole way through but I'm glad it's done and now I'm awaiting my results. If I don't get in, I'll just try harder next time.

Pray for me. 

Stay Caffeinated.

Adeel

Why I left visual effects for Indie Film Making

For a long time now I've been trying to get into the doors of visual effects. I remember deciding that I wanted to be a compositor two years ago and I'm not too sure why I chose this. I guess I was pretty good at it, a way to make a buck as they say. I made it my life goal to become a VFX supervisor in the future and even attended a full blown VFX course at Escape Studios. 

Two months after having completed the course I suddenly decided, nope... Visual effects aren't for me. Instead, I've decided to pursue a career in motion graphics and advertising. 

So why'd I make this choice so suddenly and abruptly? Well because I love indie film making way too much. Wait what? You love indie film making so you quit VFX and went to motion graphics? How does that make any sense? 

Okay, let me essssplain. I like to create, I love to create... I love to create things from scratch and make them look beautiful, I love meaning and I love story. I feel like with my compositing career I would have constantly done jobs FOR people, for countless hours and made things look the way they want it to look. And yes the same can be said about motion graphics but it's that ability to completely create something that is yours, your design and just being able to present that as your own ability. 

I've always loved deeper meanings incorporated with animation. I realised not too long ago that I wanted to make films, not a few shots for someone else to create their dream or vision. I wanna go out with my camera and film something, bring it home and edit the way I want. I feel like with motion graphics I can teach myself abstract ways of constructing meaning through beautiful imagery. I can use animation and design to tell a story one day. 

That's what design is isn't it? Conveying something to an audience using abstract imagery. 

That's not to say VFX take away from film or meaning, not at all... In fact I believe it gives a lot to film. I'm just way to brainwashed with this idea of creating meaning through weird shapes and animated imagery. 

I mean there's something so rewarding about coming up with several different ways to make one statement. Making a statement through beautiful pieces of art. 

I live off of indie cinema and watching movies like 'The Fountain', Eternal Sunshine, Her, Vanilla Sky, A Scanner Darkly and Half Nelson to name a few. It's movies like these that stray me away from Hollywood and into a world that exists only in my mind. A place where I can create anything without pleasing audiences, a place where I make things for myself using the tools I know to construct, hey if I need VFX to tell a story I will use VFX to tell a story. I just don't think I belong there at the moment. 

I just wanna make poems in the form of imagery and sound, I wanna make worlds that people can relate to in some way. I want people to feel and understand, I'd like to convey emotion from something that essentially cannot be touched or manipulated in any way. Most of all I want to create because it's what I do and keeps me going, going a motion graphics route will allow me to play around with aspects like colour, sound, shapes in order to construct a story in a stylistic way one day. I will one day create a film that has a meaning to every single shot. I want to be able to select stylistic pieces that construct together to form something more than a pack of heroes killing giant aliens from the sky.

Yes working in motion graphics won't get me making stories, but hey we've all got to make a living somehow and at least it'll teach me to make something absolutely spectacular in the future, using both design and meaning which I promise I will do one day. I'm gonna make something amazing. No matter what job I'm pulling at work, I'll always be a film maker.

Stay Caffeinated Guys. 

Adeel.

Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind

This movie... Man... I love this film. This is exactly the reason I wanna become a film maker, to make beautiful films like this.

Everything about this film just screams out amazing. 

It makes you think, it makes you question and it makes you feel. Would you ever erase someone from your life? After watching this film I'm pretty sure I don't want to at all. Even through the bad stuff, there's always some good and hey that's worth holding on to, it's also worth learning from mistakes as this film clearly wants to emphasise. 

I don't even know what to to talk about with this film, or maybe there's just too much to talk about. Everything from the beautiful music to the superb acting makes this film one to definitely remember. 

What this film taught me was that no matter how hard things get or were, no matter how dark anything gets, you hold on to those memories and you carry on, you let it mould you into something better. Although it says this using a relationship between two characters and it's amazing to see both of the characters finding each other even after they've gotten one another erased from their memories. I found this to be incredibly powerful, It plays on this idea of having a "soul mate" in a sense and uses exactly that to show even through dark there is light. Wow that sounded corny but it's true. This film makes you look back at the memories you don't want to keep but also makes you look deeper into them into something that constructed the very fabric of that memory, it makes you question why and laugh at the silliness of it all. The film makes you appreciate where you are and how your past has constructed you. It also shows that we as humans aren't always the smartest of species and yeh we make mistakes that bring us down, we get put down with our goals but like Jim Carrey says in the film... "So..." It's basically just saying "hey I know we've had our ups and downs but I really like you... So let's carry on and just be happy." And it's for that reason I can't help but love this film, it carries an incredible amount of thought provoking emotion that I cannot help but love. 

I know this one is a little all over the place but what do you expect?! The film is beautifully all over the place! 

Stay Caffeinated guys. 

Adeel

Why Her by Spike Jonze really spoke to me.

So for almost half a year, after having watched the trailer to Spike Jonze's 'Her' I was absolutely determined to watch this film. I watched the film pretty much on the release date and man... even still I find myself thinking about the ideas of it and just how beautifully constructed the films message is. I realised after my second viewing of the film how it was never about Theodore falling in love with his computer, Samantha.

Instead, the film focuses on the moments you share with remarkable people in your life. It focuses on an incredibly lost mind, by the end of the film you have two completely lost minds. It was exactly this aspect of the film that really got to me. I found that I sometimes felt like Theodore while alone at my desk or laying, I felt lost and not entirely sure what I wanted and I felt this predominantly throughout my teenage and now adult life. This feeling of being lost has always been associated with me by friends and family. I guess there was always good reason for that, to be honest I live in my head 90% of the time and hey I enjoy it. Anyway! back to the film! So one day Theodore decides to upgrade his OS into an artificial intelligence called Samantha, well he falls in love with her... and man it's so beautiful to see them grow. As Theodore once says in the film "There's something so incredible about sharing your life with someone" and that, that right there is when I truly felt Theodore had some sort of direction, something he wanted, something he was sure about.

I couldn't help but understand that, there really is something about sharing your life with someone and when Samantha Says "I can feel the fear you carry around, and I wish there was something I could do to help you let go of it, cos' if you could I don't think you'd feel so alone any more." I just understood, I guess that's because I have an amazing girlfriend who does just that for me but also the fact that I came from something dark before, we both did and well... "the past is just a story we tell ourselves" I realised that after I found someone who truly got me, someone who was there for the moment, someone who just made you forget about everything you came from regardless of the mistakes and crap.

There's an interesting thing Amy Adam's character says towards the end of the film. "fuck it". I've always been worried about just about everything and I've always been bad at relationships, always worried too much and not been exciting enough or even outgoing, until yeh... "fuck it" and now here I am three years strong. Yeh sure I still feel lost and occasionally alone at times but in a good way, I'm happy. You're only here once and if you're gonna waste your time worrying then please just stop, walk out that door and do stuff... do what you've always wanted to and from doing exactly that you'll find yourself in amazing places. I'm no expert but what I think Spike is trying to say is just a giant arse "FUCK IT" and he's telling you to be happy, the film isn't really about Samantha being a computer, the film is about Theodore just not caring any more and following what he loves, even if it doesn't end well... just keep going.


and with that,
Stay Caffeinated.
Adeel.

Also... Arcade Fire... thank you.

Hello!

Hey Guys,

Adeel here! I've always wanted to create a video blog (also known as a vlog in some parts of the internet apparently *shrugs*) based on everything creative and whatnot. unfortunately I've had two failed attempts at that due to my inability to speak into a camera alone so hell no to that. So here's the next big thing!

I'm gonna try and post a bunch of cool stuff that I make. Actually, you don't know what I make... let's start over. Hi, I'm Adeel. I make motion graphics and digital artwork. If you don't know what that is, Google my friend. So yes! I will be posting about all the art work that I've come across that I just generally find interesting and some of the stuff I make too. I'm definitely gonna be delving into a bunch of tutorials for you guys to play around with and hey, I'll learn along the way too! I predominantly work in Adobe After Effects and Maxon Cinema 4D, I do know other programs such as The Foundry's NUKE and if you would like to learn a little something about compositing, I'd definitely post all that I know about Nuke.

Alright it's getting late and I'm tired as hell.

Stay Caffeinated and Creative.

Adeel.