Pixelated Lady

I’m excited to be collaborating with Norwegian animator Tom Idland. It is a pleasure to be adding new media characters to the Old Hollywood themed party in the Macy Gray 360 degree interactive video. All along, I’ve wanted to feature the widest variety of party guests that themselves represent various eras in traditional media and new media and for me the guest list has always included a pixelated character. Now Lucy (see below) will be gracing our dance floor, bringing that vision to fruition, or at least virtually so. Multifaceted Lucy is fun to work with. As Tom says, “So few ‘details’ but still so alive!” Velkommen.

Lucy dancing in 360º interactive music video

Finger Painting and Story Time

Media imagery is now for the most part advancing on screens, rather than in print. This makes me an enthusiast of motion design. It’s the design on screens that are fundamentally driving the common aesthetic, much in the way that album covers and magazine layouts have in the past.

Below is a screen shot from Social Animal’s upcoming show open for O’Reilly‘s Ignite, “a geek variety show,” according to creator Brady Forrest. In creating a motion design for the geek audience, we felt that it would be nice to feature a new graphic style and we came up with a code based tool, programmed in processing, that allowed our designers to virtually paint with video. The resulting graphics have a live performance quality that I’m excited to explore in future projects and, strangely enough, seem to confirm the onslaught of preschool theorists who are jumping up and down about the importance of finger painting and story time to America’s future workforce. We’re always looking for outstanding storytelling and finger painting talent at Social Animal, unfortunately no nap time.

I AM big. It’s the pictures that have gotten small.

On the set of Social Animal’s 360-degree interactive music video, my friend Giuliano Bekor had me evoke Sunset Blvd’s Max Von Mayerling in an editorial spread for BlackBook Magazine. The video, which I directed and which was produced with my colleagues Matthew Forrest and Guy Shiffer, is the first of its kind in a new interactive format that I designed. It is technically, at the size of six Imax screens, the biggest music video ever shot. Most people, however, will engage with it on a much smaller screen online or on a personal mobile device. A few hours after these photos were taken, I will be directing the fabulous Macy Gray, who sings the classic song “Whatever Lola Wants” with the Deron Johnson Ensemble in a party scene that represents New Media’s arrival on the Hollywood scene. By moving the cursor, audiences will have the unprecidented ability to look around the room as they choose, checking out the party scene, which is populated by a variety of characters from the earliest days of cinema to the latest 3d avatars. These photos, whatever one may think of my modeling ability, seem oddly appropriate since Sunset Blvd, a favorite movie, concerns characters from the silent era who find themselves thrust into the new media of their time, talkies. Lets see if the addition of interactivity on video has as powerful an impact as the addition of sound had on the movies.