The annual New Zealand Best Awards celebrate excellence in graphic, spatial, product and interactive design. Here’s a few of our favourite finalists from the ‘Interactive – moving images’ category from the likes of Waxeye, Assembly, Media Design School, Powershop and Locales.
The awards will be held on Friday October 9. Entries judged ‘Best’ in each category are awarded the Gold Pin, and the very best project in each discipline will be awarded the supreme Purple Pin for work that raises the bar of New Zealand design, the best award’s website says.
The top award of the night given by the Designers Institute is the John Britten Black Pin, awarded to an individual for their leadership, vision and achievement here and internationally. The Designer’s Institute of New Zealand Black Pin for Outstanding Achievement will be awarded to a member of the institute who has made a valuable contribution to the design profession.
Locales: Gallipoli projection maps
Locales created a projection map for Gallipoli: The scale of our war of two scenes from Gallipoli. The maps of the battlefields show animated sequences of what happened at Anzac Cove on April 25 1915 and on Chunuk Bair in August 1915. The sequence combined a combination of physical, digital and technical components all working together.
See it in action here.
Assembly: PwC Extraordinary Challenges
Assembly highlighted what PwC does, from using big data to help fight cancer, to helping a domestic airline fly internationally, which many people were uninformed about. Assembly received a brief from Deutsch NY and then brought PwC’s capabilities to life. It used interactive 3D environments, extensive motion capture animation and reactive sound design to take you behind the scenes of some of the company’s projects.
For example in one part of the interactive initiative we zoom in on a hospital and then some text appears showing how big data can help fight cancer and how PwC has pulled together a diverse array of insights to help. The live site can be visited here.
Waxeye: Air New Zealand Virtual Flight Lab
And yet more great work featured in Te Papa exhibitions, working closely with Air New Zealand it imagined some of the most innovative possibilities for passenger flight as part of the airline’s 75th anniversary exhibition at Te Papa, picturing what the future of aviation could look like. Visitors of the exhibit were seated in a cabin outside the front of Te Papa, and using virtual reality technology Waxeye transformed the cabin into a lush forest, turned seats into deckchairs on a beach including a shopping experience.
According to stuff: “The headset allows one to look in any direction and see something different, as if really being there. It then turns the cabin into a Fijian beach and finally into the Shanghai waterfront during New Year fireworks.”
Users could also see kereru, tui and moa flying or running around.
One of our writers had a first-hand virtual reality experience for Visa Wellington on a Plate, read about it here.
Media Design School: Over the Moon
Over the Moon which is based on the Connie Radar comic series by Karl Wills and created by director James Cunningham. Fifteen bachelor of art and design students from Media Design School worked for 23 weeks, 1,800 days and 18,000 hours to complete the film. Phew!
Powershop NZ: The Future of Electricity
Last spring the company released a much less controversial animation than its usual campaign imagery, created by Ned Wenlock from Wellington-based animation studio Oneedo. The clip focuses on innovation, showing the company as being the more “futuristic” choice in terms of what it can offer the consumer. It features 2D animated world where consumers can go right to a literal power shop and purchase little sparks of electricity.
