#al boardman

“Rien ne résiste à un acharnement de fourmi.” 🐜🍂🐜🍃🐜🍁

Victor Hugo

Al Boardman:  Controlled Chaos

Al Boardman was originally from Liverpool and now resides in WInchester with his wife and two children where he works as a freelance Motion Designer.  According to Al  ‘I didn’t do well at school and didn’t especially enjoy my time there either’ but he did manage to become a completely self taught and highly accomplished motion designer  He originally started making gifs as a way of sharing work in progress for projects but this grew into a passion for the form in which he experimented with new techniques and forms of expression that he said was ‘ heavily influenced by the GIF-art movement that appeared to center around Tumblr.’  Al Boardman creates beautiful chaotic-seeming and yet controlled animations in which lots of bits, separately moving, somehow are part of a whole that gels together for a moment - and then flies apart again.

Posted by David

More unique art on Cross Connect Magazine:

Al Boardman, the excellent motion designer and gif artist whose work I have previously featured on Cross Connect, has just published a video he calls ‘Five Years of Gifs’, accompanied with some thoughtful comments about the creation of gifs, and art in general.  I post in here with Al’s permission

-----

I started creating GIFs over five years ago. I especially love how the size, colour and time restrictions can really push you to distill and tell a story, how creating a seamless loop can be so mesmerising and how much immediate visual impact they can have.

I have a tendency to go through different phases with designs, where I might have a month of creating GIFs that just use a monochrome palette and only use simple abstract circles. And the next month it’s all about bright, cheerful, playful, bouncy geometric shapes. I guess it’s a bit like life, we go through phases, some good, some not so good. I think my work reflects this a little, maybe.

I’m an advocate for lifelong learning. I think if you stop being interested in learning and striving to get better at what you do, that might be when work starts to suffer and perhaps becomes repetitive. I love trying out new things with motion design and animation, exploring new ideas and having fun with what I do.

"La montagne nous offre le décor ... A nous d'inventer l'histoire qui va avec !" 🌲❄🧣

Nicolas Helmbacher