Dec, 2015: VENÍ

  • VENÍ El ABC de México ([The ABC of Mexico],

    04’08”

    El ABC de México are 26 animation shorts. Using a comical, casual style, they tell of some of the adventures that happen in Mexico. This is our own particular tribute to the country that has welcomed us so kindly, every day sharing with us its traditions and customs in the form of surprising, contemplative and very funny situations.

    Technical credits: 2D illustrations created using Adobe Flash, animated in Adobe Flash and Adobe After Effects.

    Music: soundtrack with shades of the fifties and grainy vinyl, combined with chill-out and relaxing grooves like elevator music. Mexico City, 2015.

  • VENÍ Puerto Escondido ([Hidden gatteway)

    01’43”

    These three pieces are part of a poetic experiment, inspired by the work En Gijon #Escritura Digital#, by Bruno Teixidor. Though made at different times, all three share the same amateur shooting style, using reflective music accompanied by a voiceover that talks about poetic situations that we find inspiring.

    Technical credits: shot using iPhone 5, Go pro black, Canon 5D Mark II and JVC mini-VHS, edited using Adobe After Effects. Sound, the film El lado oscuro del Corazón. Narration: Mario Benedetti: x. Playas de Oaxaca, 2014.

    Music: Moondog – Hardshoe (7/4) Ray Malone. Houston, 2014. Music: Shadow Journal by Max Ritcher and the voice of “To a Stranger” by Walt Whitman. California and Baja California, 2015.

     

  • VENÍ Houston

    04’36”

    These three pieces are part of a poetic experiment, inspired by the work En Gijon #Escritura Digital#, by Bruno Teixidor. Though made at different times, all three share the same amateur shooting style, using reflective music accompanied by a voiceover that talks about poetic situations that we find inspiring.

    Technical credits: shot using iPhone 5, Go pro black, Canon 5D Mark II and JVC mini-VHS, edited using Adobe After Effects. Sound, the film El lado oscuro del Corazón. Narration: Mario Benedetti: x. Playas de Oaxaca, 2014.

    Music: Moondog – Hardshoe (7/4) Ray Malone. Houston, 2014. Music: Shadow Journal by Max Ritcher and the voice of “To a Stranger” by Walt Whitman. California and Baja California, 2015.

  • VENÍ En Baja

    03’16”

    These three pieces are part of a poetic experiment, inspired by the work En Gijon #Escritura Digital#, by Bruno Teixidor. Though made at different times, all three share the same amateur shooting style, using reflective music accompanied by a voiceover that talks about poetic situations that we find inspiring.

    Technical credits: shot using iPhone 5, Go pro black, Canon 5D Mark II and JVC mini-VHS, edited using Adobe After Effects. Sound, the film El lado oscuro del Corazón. Narration: Mario Benedetti: x. Playas de Oaxaca, 2014.

    Music: Moondog – Hardshoe (7/4) Ray Malone. Houston, 2014. Music: Shadow Journal by Max Ritcher and the voice of “To a Stranger” by Walt Whitman. California and Baja California, 2015.

  • VENÍ VOS

    01’56”

    This short experimental essay is the presentation of VOS, Visual Observation Society, a fictitious society that studies all kinds of artistic and visual disciplines: retro films, ugly design, arcade video games, pixel animation, vision tests, TV shows, etc.

    Technical credits: 2D and pixel animation sequences illustrated using Adobe Flash and animated with Adobe Flash and Adobe After Effects. 3D sequences illustrated and animated using Cinema 4D and integrated in Adobe After Effects.

    Music: psychedelic seventies sounds. Madrid, 2013.

  • VENÍ Half Life

    01’01”

    Half Life is a video game by  Valve Software that was launched in 1998. The fiction takes us to a secret laboratory in the New Mexico desert, some time in the fifties, when scientists accidentally open a portal to another dimension through which an alien race invades Earth. This is a story we’d love to see brought to the cinema, so we’ve created the opening titles for a film that does not yet exist. It’s the greeting shown to the workers of Black Mesa when they first arrive at the secret laboratories.

    Technical credits: archive videos edited and processed using Adobe After Effects to achieve a grain and colour in keeping with the 1950s aesthetic of the  Dharma Initiative, from the series Lost. 2D graphics created and animated using Adobe Flash and edited with the archive images using Adobe After Effects.

    Music: Jazzy Elevator Music. Mexico City, 2015.

  • VENÍ Love Beyond the grave

    02’52”

    We created this piece to celebrate Halloween and love—a love with no boundaries or limits, which reaches beyond death. The stars of our story are Frankenstein, Dracula and Mary Shelley, who plays with the hearts of both.

    Technical credits: archive videos, processed and edited using Adobe After Effects.

    Music: Petit fantome – L. Mexico City, 2014.

  • VENÍ Brillar

    00’36”

    Brillar is the online space where we store all our creative experiments. In Brillar we do exactly what we want at any time—for example: animation, video art, carpentry, furniture creation and restoration, interior decorating, embroidery, animated GIFs… here, we selected two video works. In one, we play at creating animated GIFs based on some of our favourite films. The other is a study of the trajectories of a ping-pong ball in a Harmony China match, shot in slow motion.

    Technical credits: film or archive videos, processed and edited using Adobe After Effects.

    Music: x. Mexico City, 2014.

  • VENÍ Brillar. Estudio de trayectorias I

    01’24”

    Brillar is the online space where we store all our creative experiments. In Brillar we do exactly what we want at any time—for example: animation, video art, carpentry, furniture creation and restoration, interior decorating, embroidery, animated GIFs… here, we selected two video works. In one, we play at creating animated GIFs based on some of our favourite films. The other is a study of the trajectories of a ping-pong ball in a Harmony China match, shot in slow motion.

    Technical credits: film or archive videos, processed and edited using Adobe After Effects. Music: x. Mexico City, 2014.

  • VENÍ CookBook Magazine

    01’30”

    Cookbook Magazine is the publishing project of Miguel Naranjo. For each issue, he invites an artist to talk about what inspires them: literature, music, cine, art, design… Then he invites other collaborating artists to reinterpret the particular world of the guest artist. We made these credits to announce all the artists featured in issue two. We used images of paranormal phenomena and the unexplained videos that populate the everyday of the internet.

    Technical credits: archive videos, processed and edited using Adobe After Effects.

    Music: Boards of Canada-Transmisiones Ferox. Madrid, 2014.

  • VENÍ Vení es molar ([Vení is groovy]

    00’18”

    This piece of self-promotion pays tribute to the explosive, creative and imaginative eighties, using forms, colours and compositions that are now back in fashion. We played with the concept of “molar”, to be groovy.

    Technical credits: 2D graphics and illustrations created and animated using Adobe Flash.

    Music: Lemaitre – Time to realize. Madrid, 2014.

  • VENÍ Guapa guapa

    02’03”

    We created this video for the launch of the political/erotic magazine La Patrie en Danger. We chose various old ads and erotic/pornographic videos, and edited them to the music of Spanish copla folk music to create a 100% home-grown effect. Our source of inspiration was Exploit, the down and dirty cinema of the seventies.

    Technical credits: archive videos processed and edited using Adobe After Effects.

    Music: Moros y Cristianos – Caridad Guardiola. Madrid, 2013.

  • VENÍ Alquimia ([Alchemy],

    02’28”

    In 2013, we celebrated the third birthday of Vení with this video clip. We were interested in experimenting with visual language, double meanings and free interpretation of audiovisual messages. We think it’s interesting to see the “making of” of this piece, because it helps to explain the magic concealed in optical tricks: https://vimeo.com/78576286.

    Technical credits: shot in Canon 5D Mark II, edited and post-produced using Adobe After Effects.

    Music: Svper-Brillar. Madrid, 2013.

  • VENÍ Un año con Vení ([A year with Vení]

    01’43”

    December 2011 was the first anniversary of our studio, Vení. Making the most of the dates, we created this video as a tribute to our clients and to wish them a happy Christmas. All the videos are shot in a mini photography studio where we captured small objects like figures from model trains, gumballs, little perfume bottles and other toys.

    Technical credits: shot in Canon 5D Mark II, edited and post-produced using Adobe After Effects.

    Music: Chapelier Fou – Al Abama. Madrid, 2011.

Vení is a graphic design and animation studio made up of Fran Asensio and Gabriela Ovando. The studio came about in 2011 in Madrid in response to our need to create much closer and more user-friendly concepts and creativities for our clients. In these five years we have grown, evolved and experimented with new visual languages. In early 2014, we moved to Mexico City to continue feeding our creativity and our thirst for adventure!

Fran also has a creative project of his own called Tropical, which experiments with different artistic styles and disciplines. This year he was one of the artists chosen to present the OFFF México Festival 2015.

www.veni.es

 “Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery. Celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: ‘It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you take them to.’ ”

 Jim Jarmusch, The Golden Rules of Filming

 In the 1960s, artistic trends such as Fluxus promoted a model of art that was inherent to life and the everyday—their art ceased to imitate life to become life itself. This change of paradigm inevitably prompted a reconsideration of the concept of the creator and the creative process. This then challenged the idea of the artist as a genius and, in the process, many other things—things to do with background, form, the work, influences, the author, the mediator, the spectator and the relation between them all. Fifty years on, now well into the 21st century, many of these ideas are still in force, similarities are inevitable, and History is packed with echoes that persist, constantly modified with passing time but, in most cases, retaining an essence that persists and becomes enduring sediment.

Art is not just imitative, it is also (and above all) interpretative, reflective and propositional. Because, as Georges Didi-Hubermann said, “there exists no image that does not simultaneously implicate gazes, gestures and thoughts. […] All images of the world are the result of a manipulation, of a concerted effort in which the human hand intervenes.” What we sometimes consider imitation implicates many other things, which may not always be evident, though they are inevitable. Such as the fact that this art is always related to its context though it may be possible to extrapolate it to others; that it draws on the circumstances that are constantly generated around it; that it relates with other disciplines and is contaminated by them; that it is subject to the vogues, fluctuations and impositions of the market, yet survives and reinvents itself; and that it changes, evolves and transforms, like the society that created it.

The words of Jim Jarmusch that head this text are cited in reference to filmmaking, but they can be extrapolated to other fields such as literature, the visual arts or design. The videos by graphic design and animation studio Vení display this liking for disciplinary contamination. On the one hand, in a formal resolution that mixes various techniques of digital animation, 3D, collage and appropriationism. On the other, in their use of an imaginary based on popular culture (El ABC de México), cinema (VOS, Half Life, Love Beyond the Grave, Guapa-guapa), pop music, the eighties, a reinterpretation of travel books (Puerto escondido, Houston, En Baja) or even paranormal phenomena or the cut-price magic that takes no pains to hide how it works (the credits of Cook Book Magazine, Alquimia, Un año con Vení). Videos in which creativity makes its way through an assortment of procedures and appeals to the viewer’s empathy by using these iconographies of the everyday that are such an integral part of our everyday lives.

Marla Jacarilla (visual artist and writer)

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