“WOWOW is an experimental film about an astronaut who works as an analyst at a faceless data collection company. Lost in a society of identical helmeted figures, he questions the surveillance of his own culture and himself. His earnest desire for emotional contact bursts through, causing hallucinations of a wild rooster who is more real and more human than himself. Suspended between the two realities, he must choose between the the safety of the world he knows and the freedom of the world he envisions.”"

[See post to watch Flash video]

[See post to watch Flash video]

A1 Parings:

This project was created for Eat Drink in Chicago back in the summer of 2008. I worked directly with the folks there to create a 3 minute viral about “Pairings” that could be served with their delicious Steak Sauce! Yum!
[See post to watch Flash video]

KCAI Persistent Visions Festival Opener:

While teaching @ the Kansas City Art Institute, I found a little extra time to work on the Festival Opener for the end of the Year show. Doug Hudson gave me free reign to create a graphic treatment that expressed the ideas of the persistence of vision. The visual concept was an eye test in a snow storm. Though the audio track was added after I submitted this little gem, I feel that the pacing holds up.

“Rigged” – feature Title Design:

“Rigged” tells the tale of a young woman caught up in the insidious arena of underground boxing. I was handed this project after the director was unhappy with the original swing. He was looking for something which gave the idea of inner strength and tradition being taken over by the brooding force of corruption and power.

DXD Intro Mix Sequence:

This project was created as an opener for the Company Dimension X Design back in 2006. We hoped to give the atmosphere of alien communication.

Written by  Christopher Trumbo, Dalton’s son, Trumbo vacillates between documentary and family footage taken at the family ranch in Los Angeles, and orations of various letters, screenplays and essays read by a myirad of celebrities, paying tribute to the word wizardry of Dalton Trumbo. Described as anything buy agreeable, Trumbo was not one to back down from seemingly impervious odds. Subpoenaed to appear before the committee, Trumbo knew he was marching into losing battle, and yet, when pressed by congress to reveal his political affiliations, Dalton not only refused, claiming the 1st amendment, he insisted that the committee display to him any evidence of his Communist tendencies, or at the very minimum some amount of “just cause”, they declined. Held in contempt of court, Trumbo served 11 months in a Kentucky Federal Penitentiary as his official penance, however, the witch hunt resulted in the decimation of the careers and livelihoods of some 300+ artists, actors, directors and writers who would eventually stand charged as anti-American. Ironically, as the film points out, Trumbo was a patriot of the highest caliber, battling the voice of tyranny were ever it stood to gain something from the marginalization of its own people.

The letters of Dalton Trumbo, read throughout the film by various affiliated actors including Michael Douglas and Paul Giamatti, level out the political weight of the film by provided insights into the character of a man who believed in, and would do anything for his beloved family. One of the most striking of these letters is to his son, Christopher, for his fourteenth birthday. In it, Trumbo ironically communicates the perils and glorious necessity that masturbation is to a young man, raising it out of the gutter by the sheer leverage and articulation of an experienced soul, but pins it as the ineffable birth-right of his only son. The consonant language of this letter, read and performed by Nathan Lane, baffles the imagination, mixing hidden double and triple meanings which dissolve the self-consciousness of pubescence in an act of desperate communication and bravery from father to son.

“Trumbo” reveals a man unwilling to sacrifice his ardent beliefs for immediate grace from a tyrannical government, and in doing so, paints yellow those who would deflect the rights of an individual based on the fears of the many.

This sets into motion an epic battle between the native people, the Na’vi, who are homogeneously connected to each other and the forest they inhabit, and the mechanized monster of a foreign military propelled by greed and assimilation. Though Cameron makes no effort to hide the overtness of it’s apocalyptic genocidal message, Avatar manages to engage the audience throughout its nearly three hour running time by creating a remarkably well paced and dynamically balanced plot.

Hailed primarily for its technological advancements of the medium, Avatar and James Cameron respectfully, have expanded the cinematic into a pseudo third dimension through the exploitation of stereoscopic vision, and the tightened articulation of a digital character’s empathetic qualities through the use of “Performance Capture”, a technology which began its development during “Polar Express” by Robert Zemeckis. Though, other recent films have employed the technology, Cameron’s drive for a new cinematic experience as well as a good portion of his own money were responsible for the development of the camera rigs and software which have made it possible.

The enjoyability of a film, for me, is based on many factors, one of which is the synchronicity between its theme and its execution. Avatar, which tells the tale of a planet stricken with the burden of foreign technology and the consumption of its natural resources, begs me to ask, “What was the impact on this planet during the making of this film”. Though, being released for the mass public does relieve Cameron from some ecological accountability, it does not sponge the mirror clean. To calculate fully, the environmental impact of any Hollywood production is beyond the measure of this article, but the cost-benefit ratio in green terms should not be overlooked and would require several levels of investigation, some of which include: the development of props and sets, the energy expended during production (filming: including camera rigs, lights and other equipment), the energy needed for post production ( cg effects, color correction, telecine etc. ), the mass technological retrofit necessary to view the film in thousands of theaters throughout the world, and the production of  any products or services created by the brand marketing of the film and its assets, just to name a few.

Cameron has never been a man to shy from controversy, and although he has continuously garnered praise and success throughout his career as an epic filmmaker, Avatar, because of its moral overtones, begs one to address the distance between his message and his execution.

one serious piece of machinery.

Today we were shown the moco rig at Calarts by Helder Sun. It is essentially a very fancy camera boom attached to a computer so that a cinematographer can choreograph movements that would be nearly impossible when done by other means. The class continues all next week, and best of all it allows me to work in my favorite OS…. dos!

I will try to get a picture of it tomorrow, but til then, you can all believe that this beast is what I am working with.

Thanks for the patience!

-s