Forage on!

Morel is the creative collective space where we brainstorm, drink strong coffee, get giddy over inspiring projects, and work together to generate solutions to problems we are passionate about. This is what we started 8 months ago. A labor of love among 3 friends.

And what a ride it has been.

Since then we collaborated with The Marshall Project to create a destination place for the conversation around the criminal justice system. We built a new branding system and website for The Center for Digital Arts and animated the importance of the Census. We helped create a new framework for Storyful, and blasted off on a crazy space adventure with the Voyager Mission for National Geographic. And along the way we enjoyed publishing own quirky newsletter, Foraged where we feature oddities and findings on the web while  featuring a few super talented curators.

We have more in the works too! Look for a personal interactive documentary about Ocean Falls made in collaboration with the National Film Board of Canada, a fresh, new branding system for Thunder 11, and a new digital multimedia magazine about immigration made with Talking Eyes Media, VII Photography and Rutgers University called Newest Americans. We feel incredibly lucky to have been able to work on the range of projects with the teams of people that we have.

And the journey continues but now down a slightly different path. We’ve always seen morel as an evolving collective, a mind meld where we come together to make stuff we care about, and it will continue to be so. But for the foreseeable future morel will be evolving to take on only a few special projects while we explore some individual opportunities that have arisen.

As always we are grateful to you for your support and we can’t wait to share the next chapter with you.

Thank you!

Jody + Kate + Mike

An email conversation with Thomas Dagg

We recently came across Thomas Dagg's photography series where he merged the Star Wars world and characters with our real world. It was like he had gone into our childhood minds and encapsulated what we had imagined every day. We emailed him and asked him a few questions about his wonderful and whimsical series. 

Go here to see/read it.

foraged: issue #12

This issue is curated by Reanna Evoy, friend, art director, shoe fetishist and arbiter of cool. Thanks Reanna!

foraged: issue #11

This issue is dedicated to small but mighty teams. A lovely father/son exchange, The Marshall Project launch, and the group effort around global science. Happy reading!

An email conversation with Chris Lynn

We fell in love with this wonderful artistic collaboration between Chris Lynn and his son Moses.

See/read it here.

foraged: issue #10 (Special Issue)

Producer, curator, wordsmith, friend Web Barr curated a super special Halloween issue for us ... Take a look if you dare! Thanks Web ... 

foraged: issue #09 (Special Issue)

The Infamous artist/photographer/journalist/educator Richard Koci Hernandez did us the honor of curating this weeks issue of Foraged. Thanks Koci! We had so much fun collaborating, stay tuned for other guest curators, subscribe here if you haven't already....

We pre-launch launch! Hope you're inspired ...

We're excited to share the first phase of our collaboration with The Center for Digital Arts, complete with a Joss Whedon quote. More coming in early November ... 

Center for Digital Arts Re-Design

We consider ourselves lifelong students and so are super excited about our next re-design project: branding, design & content strategy for a school for digital creatives! The deadline is fast and furious so updates to come sooner rather than later ... 

foraged: issue #08

This week was all about connection, communication, & networks–digital and analog. But mostly we just wanted an excuse to reach out to Graham at the NYTimes about his latest project! You can see the latest issue here. Or you can subscribe for the next version of foraged here. Enjoy!

Q&A: Graham Roberts NYTimes "Inside the Quartet"

Inside the Quartet, by The New York Times

When the New York Times published a story about the prolific Kronos Quartet, we were floored by the sophisticated presentation that revealed the subtle communication between performers. Using the kind of 3D motion capture systems we often find in high-end, animated movies (think Gollum, Avatar, etc), Senior Graphics Editor Graham Roberts and the Times team filmed a performance and turned that footage into a gorgeous visualization rendered in flowing particle streams. We caught up with Graham to find out more about this intriguing project, Inside the Quartet.

Graham Roberts, Senior Graphics Editor for the New York Times, Photo by Alex John Beck

This is a crazy project, how did it come about?

Like most projects we do, it was in a sense an iteration on something we did previously, in this case a project called Connecting Music and Gesture which aimed to demystify conducting. For that project we put renowned conductor Alan Gilbert in a motion capture suit to represent his movements in a new, engaging way … make the invisible visible, etc. Daniel Wakin, our culture editor, conducted (no pun intended) the interview for that project. Some time after, Dan came to us with the idea that the Quartet could use a similar kind of treatment to give people an inside look at the subtle kinds of communication that musicians use to make it all work. To see if this made sense, we met up with a casual quartet composed of some musicians that Dan knew, to watch them play and discuss some of the issues of communication with them. What we found was really interesting to us and that there really was a whole world of subtle interactions that would be interesting to try and reveal. 

I felt that to get a general audience interested in this, we would want to work with a really well known group, and I couldn't think of anyone better than Kronos Quartet, known for their openness to experimentation, and being in existence for more than 40 years. I reached out to them, and to my delight they had seen the Connecting Music and Gesture project and liked it very much. They were up for the experiment, now we would just have to find a time in their busy schedule to make it work! Getting everyone together on a particular date was one of the major challenges of this.

Kronos Quartet has been performing together for more than 40 years.

Clearly there was a sophisticated team in place, can you illuminate some details about the production process, team and timeline?

There were several components to make this all work the day of the shoot:

- First, I knew this had to be in an environment that we could control, and get the highest quality audio recording, including multi-tracked isolated audio signals without using isolation booths. I had some experience outside of work at a studio called Dubway in downtown Manhattan that I knew had a relatively large live room with high ceilings, and a top notch staff. I reached out to them explaining that we wanted to record Kronos Quartet for an experimental project, and they were very accommodating. We were trying to time the day around when Kronos Quartet would be nearby on tour, and we would be ready as well. There was a lot of scheduling and re-scheduling. Kronos brought their own sound engineer who worked with Dubway's engineer.

- Next, the point cloud data was recorded with an array of Microsoft Kinects by a 3-person team called OpenShades. They hacked a bunch of old laptops we had, using a dedicated laptop for each Kinect, and later helped us sync this data in time and space.

- Two of our best videographers, Leslye Davis and Catherine Spangler, shot video of the performances and interviews, and later helped organize all of this footage.

- Dan Wakin, our culture editor, conducted the interview.

- and myself, to make sure everything was coming together, and that we were covering everything we needed.

Then production:

We had a ton of material, and originally we had been hoping to publish in time for a Kronos performance at Carnegie Hall a mere month away. It was clear that there were far too many considerations to make this happen. So the project became something I thought a lot about and made incremental progress on between many other things that were driving up, not unusual in this environment. I needed to learn how to work with the data from the Kinects, for one. Jeremy White in graphics and I worked on this particle data. One of Jeremy's important contributions was to find a way to cut out the musicians particles from everything else. The particle data was a huge mess including all of the background of the studio, mic stands, music stands, etc. He programmatically created polygonal zones around each musician that would allow us to separate out the particles that belonged to musicians vs. all of the other particles. And critically, group these particles to belong to a particular musician, so that I could then affect them as a group by what that musician was playing.

And then of course all of the 3D work to make the dot cloud look a certain way, all of the camera angles, etc. And then connecting each cloud to the correct audio signal to have the clouds appear and disappear along with the contributions of that musician to the overall sound.

Motion Capture suit test in the studio.

For the real geeks, what specific technology is behind this?

As mentioned, we recorded the point cloud using an array of five Microsoft Kinects, each connected to a dedicated laptop. This data was converted to the .prt binary particle format and loaded into Autodesk Maya using an open source library called Partio. Then the Maya particle engine rendered each pixel into a tiny sphere, which I felt added more depth and "resolution" to the aesthetic. The isolated audio signals for each musician was processed using the Trapcode Sound Keys plug-in in After Effects.

We love the look of the webpage, how do you decide when to break the mold and build a custom layout?

For a standalone multimedia project like this, we almost always create something custom. Each project has specific demands, and it usually makes sense to design for those from the get go if you can. I created a rough mockup of the page in Illustrator, with the idea that it should be as simple as possible, and tied together by some of my favorite quotes from the Kronos interviews. At first I had a picture of the Quartet at top, but we realized that it needed something else to clue people in to the idea that they were going to see something a little different. So we scrapped the photo, and replaced it with the animated dot cloud cover. This I think helped entice people get to the videos since there is a fair amount of copy. Necessary copy, to give readers some perspective on the day and a little background into what we were trying to do, but I was also concerned that the videos would be pushed down too far. Shan Carter further refined the design, and is the one who built the page.

What was your inspiration for the project?

An acquaintance, James George, has done some amazing filmmaking with this kind of approach. He created an interesting documentary called Clouds that actually works on the Oculus Rift. He developed a system called rgbd toolkit which pairs a DSLR with a Kinect. I didn't end up using this system, but it was one of the first places I was made aware of the possibilities. To me it's almost like filmmaking in reverse. You record the space in 3D, and then choose all of the camera angles, and the aesthetic, later. Also, having played in quartets myself (cello) I was already interested in the subject matter. I liked the idea of creating this sort of synesthesia effect, where you would literally see, through appearance and disappearance, how each musician was contributing to the whole. Even as a musician who can read a musical score, I found this was really a great way to understand who was doing what.

What did you learn during the process of crafting this story?

On a practical, dorky level I learned a lot about handling particle data. More generally, I learned that keeping it simple can sometimes be the most effective way to communicate. We had a lot of complicated ideas about using this data ... like doing something in webGL, letting people rotate around, etc. I think this would have ultimately been very limiting though. The simple idea of letting people see in a sense what they were hearing, and pairing this with carefully considered editing of a great interview from true masters of the medium was, in the end, I think the best way to engage our audience, and give them some insights into this music.

And for fun: if you had to write a fortune cookie, what would it say?

You will eat a dry tasteless cookie in the near future at an embarrassingly non-authentic Chinese-food restaurant.

Thanks, Graham! Always a pleasure and can't wait to see what you'll do next! Check out more of Grahams work at www.grahaphics.com

foraged: issue #07

The 7th issue of foraged is just off the internet press. We were obsessed with the obsessed in this issue, those who spend their lives exploring the upclose and the intimate. You can see the most recent version here and if you're keen to get issue 08 to your inbox, subscribe!

Ocean Falls, B.C.

Our latest field trip to a remote town in Northern British Columbia. See the multimedia essay here!

foraged: issue #06

Since we are currently in transition we are fascinated by everything around us that is evolving, adapting, and in-process. Thus the theme of our latest issue of foraged. Peruse it here or if you're feeling bold you can subscribe to get the next themed issue. 

Q&A: Frédéric Dubois Creator of "Atterwasch"

When we first saw the interactive documentary "atterwasch" our whole team dropped everything and got sucked into the experience. It's a haunting cautionary tale about a tiny German town struggling to exist while a Swedish energy company threatens to demolish their village and strip-mine it to harvest brown coal. The story begins in the far future, imagining an apocalyptic world where the mining operations consume the landscape, then moves back in time to the earliest days of the town’s existence. We caught up with author and producer Frédéric Dubois for insights into how they made this gorgeous, cinematic story.

How did the Atterwasch project come about?

My pal photographer Marco del Pra' and myself were both completely blown away when we heard that villages were still being removed in Germany to make way for coal extraction. We couldn't believe it, and so we drove down from Berlin to the Lusatia region to get the story from the horse's mouth. There, we drove into Atterwasch and thought "wait a minute, this is it."

Clearly there was a sophisticated team in place, can you illuminate some details about the production process and timeline?

The project took 10 months to produce, from concept to delivery. Marco and I developed the storyline, worked out the storyboard with gifted illustrator Edith Carron and went into production with the coders at Honig Studios, sound designer Hannes Schulz and web designer Olivier Guillard. There were tons of iterations and many production steps, such as finding the funds, organizing the trips to Atterwasch and negotiating the interactive storytelling part.

Why did you chose to make this a scroll-down documentary and how did that shape your vision for the narrative?

Frédéric Dubois, Author and Producer of Atterwasch.

We were clear on the fact that we wanted to confront the viewer with a village that has been removed and so we decided to start the experience in the future, making it possible to scroll back history, so to speak. We thought that this dramatic twist would work well with the story and the technology.

How does the interactive documentary form appeal to you as a storyteller?

Interactive documentaries are my passion. I used to work for the National Film Board in Montreal and developed the gusto there. Now I'm trying to make a living by authoring and producing internet-adapted documentaries. I believe in the internet as a place where we can tell long stories, where we can experiment and play. This is what I'm attracted to.

What would you recommend to people who would like to take on a large interactive documentary such as Atterwasch?

Do it. But do it by surrounding yourself with capable and complementary hard-working craftsmen and craftswomen. For me, web documentaries are a genre, not a trend of a fad.

And for fun: if you had to write a fortune cookie, what would it say?

You are a storyteller. Tell a story that matters.

Thanks Frédéric! Follow Frédéric on twitter at: http://twitter.com/fredericdubois

foraged: issue #05

Here is the fifth issue of foraged. Check out our spacey new project for National Geographic, listen to the sweet sounds of Wikipedia, discover the unlikely friendship between Matisse and Picasso and more. You can also see our gatherings in html form, enjoy. And to get future issues delivered straight to your inbox, subscribe here.

Voyager Launched

Today we launched a new project into the outer reaches of the digital galaxy for National Geographic. Check out our immersive approach to the Voyager Space Program. We handcrafted the experience with a gorgeous soundtrack to match the stunning visuals, so turn up your speakers and enjoy!

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/space/voyager/

foraged: issue #04

Here is the fourth issue of foraged. Research around a current project has made us a bit obsessed with the concept of time. Here are some of our gatherings in html form, enjoy. And to get future issues delivered straight to your inbox, subscribe here.

foraged: Issue #03

We just shipped Issue 03 of foraged out over the internet. The last two weeks led us down some crazy roads where we found a few great gems. You can see the html version here. But if you like what you see and want to have it delivered to your inbox doorstep, subscribe here!

The Words Collection

Words are everywhere in the physical landscapes around us. We perused our images that had captured a few of those found random words. This is what happens when you treat your Instagram feed like one large set of refrigerator poetry magnets...

If you come across any words in the real world while you're 'gramming' make sure to post them and add @refrigeratorpoetry to the description, we'd love to curate from more examples for our new feed.