In the third episode of our interview series from OFFF 2011 we chat with artist, designer, illustrator and all-round dude – Matt W. Moore.

We caught up with him when he was close to finishing at Mural at the OFFF Festival in Barcelona. For more information about his work check out this previous post.

Matt was also kind enough to create our masthead this week.

We continue our interview series from OFFF 2011 with Rick Banks, who some of you might know better as Face37. We cought up with Rick just before he was about to give a talk about his work at the festival. In this short interview he tells a little more about his favourite design books, being a knee surgeon and following Stefan Sagmeister around Barcelona.

Rick has also designed our masthead this week. The typeface featured is a future release called Bella. More info about the typeface on FFF soon.

As you may have read, a few of us FFFers visited the OFFFest in Barcelona this year. Armed with a list of questions, a mic & two Canon 550D’s we set up meetings with some talented people to have a relaxed chat with us on camera.

We kick off our series of interviews from the lovely city of Barcelona with one of Spain’s greatest creative talents Alex Trochut.

To keep things more FFF we made the questions short and snappy and let the conversation develop when it did. We hope you enjoy the first in this series of 8.

Let us know what you think. Is this kind of thing something you’d like to see more of on FormFiftyFive?

Part of the FormFiftyFive Team flew to Barcelona to visit the OFFF 2011. We listened to some rather talented people talk about their work, met a few of them personally and asked them a few questions for you and filmed the whole thing!

We’ll release one interview a week over the next couple of months. So keep an eye on FFF and keep up to date with us on Twitter @formfiftyfive.

If you’ve got a decent connection watch the video in HD on Full Screen!

— Filmed by Alex Nelson, Jack Daly & Glenn Garriock on Canon’s 550D with Music Starslinger (You can buy ‘Mornin’ here)

More photos of the event and Barcelona can be found on the OFFF Flickr Group. Add your own!

Here’s the latest short film from Barcelona based audiovisual artist César Pesquera. As you can tell from the images above, it’s rather pleasing on the eye. You can see more beautiful stills here.

Circle one is the disturbing and distressing tale of René — a young man trying to get on with his relatively empty life. When things start to look up, the torment starts. I was drawn to the film by it’s looks, but it turns out the storyline is just as strong. The set design is beautiful and the attention to detail is super high, luckily this never distracts from René’s journey, partly because Pablo Menasanch playing René is so arresting and writer / director César Pesquera has done such a great job setting and maintaining the tone. And of course, hats off to the DPs, Alejandro Oset and José Luís Bernal for making the most out of the environment.

You can watch the trailer here.

César has been kind enough to give FormFiftyFive access to the film for two weeks — head over to the exclusive online preview page and use the password found on our Facebook and Twitter pages. The password will be valid ’til May 23rd.

The film is currently doing the rounds at festivals and galleries. You can find out more screening details on Facebook and Twitter.

After you’ve enjoyed the show, come back and read my short interview with César.

—FormFiftyFive Hello César, I’ve just watched Circle One for the third time, it’s both beautiful and harrowing, can you tell us a little about your influences and inspiration?

—César Pesquera Thank you. I am glad you like it enough to watch it three times. It all started with the idea of something happening or appearing in you daily life, in your normal environment. At the end of the day if you think about it all the horror movies are based on that, something strange, disturbing, unknown that produces a destabilisation in someone’s normal life. Then I had this image in my mind of someone walking down these corridors, very much like in THX 1138. I finally borrowed some elements from Dante’s Divine Comedy and that gave me some sort of scaffolding to start writing the script.

But I guess the central idea behind the film is to what extent those seemingly traumatic events are unconsciously caused by ourselves in order to facilitate the escape from a trap that is essentially of our own making.

In terms of influences, as I said, the film is a combination of the influence of mainstream directors like George Lucas and Stanley Kubrick, whose work I consider visually fascinating and, let’s say, more art house directors like Tarkovski, Bela Tarr or Michael Haneke, whose films I love and whose influence can be seen in Circle One’s pace and atmosphere.

—FFF Corridors seem to play a big part in sci-fi films, could you talk about the environment in which René is living?

—CP Yes, actually this image of someone walking down these big corridors was present in the project even before any narrative element, so I knew that these parts where going to play a big roll in the film. Somehow I am fascinated by these kinds of transitory spaces, the idea of non-place coined by Marc Augé, they are places without history that affect our notions of space, our relationship with reality and with others. Can be supermarkets, highways or hotels. René is living in Circle One which in Dante’s Divine Comedy is the Limbo so somehow I liked the idea of him living in a massive non-place. It has also to do with the idea of liminality, the idea of being in some kind of transitional state, like René is. He is in a no man’s land somehow.

—FFF That’s really interesting, I’m a big fan on the non-place myself. I guess this must have been what attracted me to the film.

I noticed that some of the music was composed and performed by yourself, you must feel very passionately about it. How important do you think the sound design is?

—CP Sound design is essential, but not only in terms of music but also in terms of the whole atmosphere of the short film. We worked a lot on that aspect, if you listen carefully you’ll hear these rumours, like engines. Somehow in my mind I was imagining that this world is formed by nine circles (like in the Divine Comedy’s hell) that are actually moving until their position periodically allows the redistribution of people between the different circles. That treatment in sound design gave the film that atmosphere of unease that I was looking for. Quique Montaña and Pau Tolosa from La Fabrica de Carbon did a great job with sound design. Vicent Fugere composed the track ‘Le Cycle Sans Retard’ and I composed ‘Architecture Of Uncertainty’. We are now thinking of remixing each other and releasing a limited edition of the soundtrack in vinyl.

—FFF It certainly produces an uneasy viewing experience! Makes me think of what a combination of Clint Mansell’s soundtrack for Moon and The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place by Explosions in the Sky would sound like.

You can see Build’s Grid-Based-Clock in the trailer — I personally love the light switch in René’s room, can you tell us little more about the technology in the film?

—CP Those little details tell the viewer that the action is not taking place here and today but somewhere else, in a different time, in this case in an hypothetical future. That was important to me since I didn’t want to tell the story of one person, someone that could be your neighbour, but I wanted to tell an idea, a concept, like in a fable. Michael C. Place kindly allowed me to use his Grid-Based-Clock and I designed the rest of the graphics in order to portray, with just a few elements, an alternative world. In fact I even created an alternative alphabet in order to achieve that.

—FFF You did a great job. I like the fact it’s still believable, nothing too extravagant.

What are your plans for Circle One and the future?

—CP At the moment I want to show the short film as much as I can at festivals. In June I’ll be talking about it at OFFF 2011 in Barcelona, and now I am working on a new short film that will close some kind of trilogy about transitory places together with Circle One and my previous short film Passer/8.

—FFF Well I wish you the best of luck and look forward to seeing it on the big screen at OFFF!

— Websites www.cesarpesquera.com www.reformcomm.org www.circleone.info

Facebook / Twitter

— Words: Sam Mallett / César Pesquera Images: Alejandro Oset / José Bernal / César Pesquera

A series of videos featuring a broad spectrum of designers and thinkers from Kit Hinrichs, Stefan Bucher and Jessica Helfand to Tony Hawk, Daniel Pink and Pete Docter – all answering the questions:

“What single example of design inspires you most?” and “What problem should design solve next?”

I’ve gotten through a few this morning, and along with a nice cup of tea, they’re an excellent start to a Friday morning. Thirty Conversations on Design.

Read more

We caught up with Fred Deakin, Creative Director of Airside, at his Home in London to chat about their work, their progress and of course Lemon Jelly. We hope you find it as entertaining as it we did shooting the interview. It’s worth watching all the way to the end especially for the last question and for a preview of what’s next!

Thanks to all of you who sent us your questions and a huge thanks to FFF’s Gil Cocker for helping us put the final interview together!

We shortened the questions for the video, below are the full questions we asked Fred.

1. Can you give us a brief introduction to yourself and what you do at Airside.

2. Hi Fred just finished reading your book which I loved I was particularly interested in the ‘group brain’ idea as a way of working, I was just wondering if this was applied to every airside job or do you apply it as and when budgets are there?

3. How do strike a good balance between work and play – obviously Lemon Jelly is a big passion of yours, outside of work and how do you find the chance to pursue this with the time it deserves without it hindering your work at Airside?

4. How important do you think interning for both graduates and agencies is? Ethics and social responsibility seem to be at the core of Airside, do you think interns should be expected to work for free in what is already an extremely competitive market exacerbated by the current economic climate?

5. How do you find new work, especially in these ‘difficult’ times? Do clients mostly approach you based on previous experience or do you seek out opportunities to work with people/companies that interest you? Virgin Trains for example or Yakult?

6. How do you measure success?

7. How do you not lose interest and flit from project to project?

8. Would you say that Airside has a distinctive style, and if so is that something you aim to achieve?

9. The Airside Shop has loads of design lovelies, do the agencies’ designers produce the creative themselves, and If so is studio time allocated or is it more extra-curricular? Also, how important is the Shop as a creative outlet for the agency? Secondly, are you surprised more agencies don’t have shops of their own shops? Finally, what happens with the shops profits?

10.You’ll no doubt be sick of answering these questions, but… where did the names ‘Airside’ and ‘Lemon Jelly’ come from?

11. Is there anyone in Design or Music that you think is currently doing innovative work that inspires you?

12. As part of Lemon Jelly you’ve worked with William Shatner, other than him who have been the influences on your career?

13. What’s happening next for Lemon Jelly? Are you planning any new projects?

14. What are top 3 favorite album covers?

Today’s your last chance to send/tweet/comment your questions for Fred Deakin at Airside. Read more about Airside and the interview on the original post.

I’m delighted to announce that we will be interviewing Fred Deakin next week in our second video interview. Fred is co-founder and creative director at the British multi-disciplinary agency Airside and one half of Mercury and Brit nominated dance act Lemon Jelly.

This is your chance to email & tweet us your questions for Fred, as well as writing them in the comments below. We will collect all the best questions on Monday 20th July 2009.

In the first of our video interviews we had a chance to chat with Alex Trochut in his Barcelona studio. We asked him questions that you – our dear readers – sent us a few weeks ago. Read more

Tonight is your last chance to send us your questions for Alex Trochut. We’ve had a great response this far! I’m sure Alex will be pleased. You can still send us more! Check out the questions from the original post for inspiration, before we send the over to the man himself tomorrow.

Massive thank you to all the people that have already contributed!

June is swiftly approaching so we’re getting everything ready for the launch of the new site, including our first video interview. To get things started we’ve invited 5 inspiring designer and illustrators to answer your questions. First up is Barcelona’s most prolific illustrator Alex Trochut, who must hold the record for features on this site by now.

We’d like to invite you all to ask Alex a question either by email (hello[at]formfiftyfive.com), by leaving a comment or a tweet (@formfiftyfive).

We’ll collect all questions until the 19th May ’09.