Episode 14: Eye-popping 2D and 3D graphics with Ivan Despi, The Acid House
Ivan Despi is an artist, director and founder of The Acid House, a motion design, 2D and 3D animation studio based in Manila.
Ivan Despi studied business in college in Philippines. Illustration was a hobby that eventually became a full-time job.
Kick Push Coast
Kick Push Coast was a play on skate culture inspired by Lupe Fiasco’s track, Kick, Push. Originally a 2D illustrator, Kick Push Coast was Ivan’s first 3D illustration project using Octane Render.
Octane Render is a GPU Render engine with features that speed up and ease the 3D illustration process.
“From this point on, I just kept on creating more 3D works until I evolved into making my own characters and all the other work that you have seen.”
36 Days of Type
36 Days of Type is a yearly open call where designers, illustrators and graphic artists are invited to express their interpretation of the letters and numbers of the Latin alphabet.
To submit their work, participants upload their typographic interpretations of each letter onto Instagram.
Adobe Muse 2018 – Splash Screen
The splash screen for Adobe Muse was a collaboration between Acid House and Argentinian Artist, Angelo Torres. Ivan was commissioned by Adobe after they came across Ivan’s works for the 36 Days of Type project.
“Whoever was running Adobe Muse on their computers would see that artwork on their screen so that was really special to me.”
Dust Road Renegades
Dust Road Renegades is a short film for Freitag’s Tarp Blanche Series. The film debuts their newest bag model, the F155 Clapton. The Acid House was the first studio outside of Europe to be commissioned by Freitag.
Freitag creates their bags from recycled materials and wanted this to be captured in the film. The four characters that formed the band in the film were based off Ivan’s 5 year old son’s sketches.
One of the Characters, named Danggit, was based on a type of dried fish in the Philippines with the same name. Danggit was Grey’s favourite food, which motivated him to create a character out of it.
“I want to show him that you can do something on paper, and it can develop into something else, and eventually, it's going to be shown somewhere else and people will like it.”
Hanabi
Hanabi was an animation for Pause Fest, 2019. Pause Fest comes up with an Annual Theme, and animators and filmmakers would work on their films based on their own interpretation of the theme.
“We wanted to make a commentary on the way that people are divided or separated by their own biases and their own uninformed assumptions. Hanabi is the Filipino word for woven and what we wanted to communicate was, that every individual is like an individual thread. You can go on your own separate path. If you want, you can be oblivious to whatever is happening to everyone else. But it will be important that if we want to move forward, if we want to be stronger, we have to be stronger together. Those individual threads have to be woven together in order to create a community that is composed of individual who helps each other and in turn, a community able to sustain itself.”
The Garbage Monster
Ivan’s contribution to EYEYAH! magazine Trash issue.
Being a fan of monsters and robots, his son sketched the monster and inverted trash can on Ipad. Ivan then added on to the sketch, rendered and animated it to become The Garbage Monster.
Recommendations
Ivan really liked the 2D and 3D hybrid of Mitchell vs The Machines.
He admires the way the GIF animations are layered on top of the 3D renders and the characters that look hand-painted. He also brings up the technicality in animation - the stretch and the squash of the faces and the blend shapes are highly technical.
“The fun factor of the movie kind of shields the fact that it's technically hard to execute that kind of look. It takes a lot of talent to be able to create something like that in 3D and then kind of bastardise your 3D render by adding these 2D Gif animations which really mess up the frame. It’s so much fun to look at.”
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