Un proyecto inacabado…

El reciente fallecimiento de John H. Conway, creador del famoso “Juego de la Vida”, así como este fantástico vídeo que me ha pasado mi amigo Víctor, sobre ese mismo tema, ha hecho que recordara un viejo guion que desarrollé hace ya siete años (!) para una animación 3D.

Iba a ser una especie de “Nature by Numbers 2”. De hecho, la empecé, llegué a modelar algunas cosas… pero entonces me entró mucho trabajo de encargo, pasaron los meses, perdí el interés por ella y… nunca vio la luz.

Bastante al principio del vídeo tenían que aparecer unas estructuras animadas, no exactamente un “Juego de la Vida”, pero sí otro tipo de autómatas celulares, basados en la obra de Stephen Wolfram, mediante los cuales se explicaran los patrones geométricos de la piel de una serpiente. Y a partir de ahí muchas cosas más…

No creía que fuera a enseñarlo, porque es tan solo un material interno de trabajo (que todavía tenía que pulir) y que me serviría de ayuda para planificarlo todo. Pero, oye, ya que estamos viviendo tiempos extraños, vamos a hacer cosas extrañas.

Aquí os dejo con esa vieja “animática”, a modo de boceto en movimiento, con la que os podéis hacer una mejor idea de qué iba la cosa. Recuerdo que se la mandé a los propietarios de la música, para poder tramitar las debidas licencias de uso. Pero nunca me contestaron…

No sé si algún día recuperaré la idea, o alguna parte de lo que aquí aparece… Todo es posible :-)

Originality above all: bank plagiariz(ed) Nature by Numbers (SOLVED)

IR A VERSIÓN EN ESPAÑOL

UPDATE October 15, 2014: I am pleased to report that, after the release of this news, both the National Bank of Greece and also the audiovisual company creators of video contacted me in order to fix this situation. And we have finally reached an agreement: production company has licensed the use of the original images from Nature by Numbers, and has committed to rebuild the promotional video using my images, with its color adjustments and customized postpro. So finally everything ended well ;-)


Four years ago, when I finished and I shared my animation Nature by Numbers, I never imagined that it would be so successful and eventually had such a repercussion. It is a curious thing happens when you create something: you never know how it will be received by the rest of the people… Sometimes you feel very satisfied and proud of a new project, but it remains completely ignored. And sometimes you think you’ve done something too rare and personal, that will not catch interest at all, and it happens just the opposite. This was the case for NBN, certainly: a video that today has nearly 4 million views on YouTube and a million and a half on Vimeo, which has been linked from many websites and it has brought me many satisfactions and surprises.

The last surprise, not exactly happy, is that someone plagiarized part of it. And I use the word “plagiarism” quite properly, I think. Because is not that they have used images of the animation to create other content (I mean a “copy-paste”, something that has also happened before), but they have re-created completely new scenes “slightly inspired” in my work —read with ironic tone—. And it’s not a video made ​​for a small company in the middle of nowhere, in the other corner of the world. Nope… This is a promotional video for the National Bank of Greece.

Tomorrow I will send a small note to the gentlemen of that financial institution. Especially, to translate to them the originality and professional attitude of the company that manages his advertising account (since I prefer to believe that the bank staff does not know anything about this issue).

By the way, thank you very much to Alexander Selkirk, who put me on the track of this fact, through Twitter.

I leave you with a few screenshots, so you can compare because how knows… maybe it’s only my imagination ;-)

00_nbn_vs_nbg01_nbn_vs_nbg02_nbn_vs_nbg03_nbn_vs_nbg04_nbn_vs_nbg05_nbn_vs_nbg06_nbn_vs_nbg

The promotional video, hosted on YouTube was deleted after the publication of this post, although I keep a copy, for posterity, logically ;-)

And here is “Nature by Numbers”, with its original music by a genius, Wim Mertens: