Dialog Box

Video on the web: My favorite designers

by Hillman Curtis

“Honor thy error as a hidden intention.”

—Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt

In early 2004, Karen Tenenbaum, a Creative Director from Adobe, called me to inquire about some site design they needed. The job itself wasn’t right for the studio at the time, so I declined. Karen and I had stayed close since I designed the Adobe.com site back in ’99, so we took a moment to catch up and hear what each other was doing. I mentioned an idea for an online video series that would celebrate the design work of my peers. Karen was immediately interested and thought Adobe would be interested in sponsoring the series. Turns out they were, and we eventually worked out a deal. Part of the deal I made was that no designer would ever have to mention Adobe or their software; instead the spots would focus on the designer’s work, process, and inspirations.

I started the series filming my friend Stefan Sagmeister, an Austrian émigré who’s lived in New York the past 15 years or so. I’ve been a big fan of Sagmeister since I got into the business myself. More recently, we’ve become friends and colleagues, and in 2004 we were invited to give a couple of talks together in Texas, one at a conference in Dallas and another at the Creative Summit at Texas State University in San Marcos. We flew down, gave the Dallas talk, and headed down to San Marcos in a rented Mustang convertible. I took my camera along and shot about two hours of footage everywhere from the airport, to the car, to Stefan’s talk. Later I edited those two hours down to six or seven minutes for the final cut. My goal with Stefan was to capture his unique conceptual way of thinking, as well as his offbeat humor and quirky but approachable charm.

Next up was Paula Scher, a partner at Pentagram and another of my all-time favorite designers. Paula was a gas to hang out with and her shoot went extremely well, though I chose a location that overlooked Fifth Avenue. If you listen carefully you’ll hear the roar of Midtown Manhattan throughout the spot. I went in thinking I knew a lot about Paula’s work and left amazed and inspired by all that she’s created in her 34 years as a designer. Then I filmed Milton Glaser, the design legend who created the “I ♥ NY” logo and so much more over his 50-plus-year career. The spot was an honor to shoot, but difficult. I was intimidated interviewing such an iconic figure and came in with my standard questions, such as “What’s your creative process?” and “Who are your influences?” Milton was polite, but seemed disinterested in such questions. I got the feeling that he’d answered these questions many times in many interviews before. We sat across from each other, me beside my tripod and Milton against a wall covered with a black backdrop. Midway through the interview I sensed we were both growing uncomfortable. So I suggested that he show me his building. I unlocked the camera from the tripod and kept the tape running as we explored the four floors of his brownstone. That’s when the interview took off. We both loosened up as we looked through his countless posters, books, sketchbooks, and paintings. In the end, the hardest part was deciding what to leave in and what to take out. I’d set a time limit of seven minutes for these spots, and whenever possible I like to keep them even shorter. But with Milton there were so many inspirational moments I didn’t want to let go.

Now to the one I almost botched.

Shooting James Victore

James Victore makes graphically simple yet powerful, symbolic posters, many of which are charged with controversial political themes rich with visual and thematic contrasts. Many of them consist of nothing more than a simple drawing, or even just broad strokes of black ink on a solid background—often of pure white.

In retrospect, it might have been appropriate to let a similar kind of contrast drive the shoot itself, where James, in a black t-shirt, would talk about his work in the middle of an empty white room. But that’s not what I did. Instead, I went to his workspace, site unseen, to shoot him in his own environment. I hadn’t scouted the location, partly because I was very busy in the days leading up to the shoot, but also because I like to allow for those fortunate accidents that lead to unexpected and beautiful results. But not all accidents are fortunate; sometimes the space you leave for serendipity results in major problems down the road.

The Shoot

The shoot was very simple. I used my Panasonic DVX100 camera, a tripod, and a Sennheiser ME66/K shotgun mic that I mounted on the camera. I used a short XLR cable to plug the shotgun mic into the camera’s audio input.

As mentioned in the previous chapter, the problem with on-camera mics is that they are susceptible to motor and handling noise. In general it’s wise to avoid using on-camera mics if possible, but it worked for me this time because I was in a quiet place and was able to get the subject—James—close to the camera. As for lighting, I used only natural light. But I didn’t take full advantage of it because I’d set up the camera in all-auto mode: auto-focus, autowhite balance, and auto-iris. I did this because at the time I still didn’t feel confident enough with the camera to dial in the right settings manually.

Unfortunately the resulting image suffered as the auto controls often made safe, middle-of-the-road choices…which is what they are built to do.

I had James sit at his desk and positioned the camera directly across from him, framing his sketchpad in the lower half of the shot. So far, so good. James works his ideas out by sketching, so that part of the shot made sense. But when you set up a shot, you have to think of the entire composition.

James’s desk was positioned in front of a portion of his poster collection. He has one of the largest poster collections I’ve seen and many of them cover the walls of his workspace. The posters behind him, occupying the top half of my composition, were beautiful and I thought they’d make a fine background for the shot. But the posters were also busy, with a lot of visual information. Many were political posters, bold and designed to grab your attention, and they ended up diverting attention from the actual subject, James.

Another problem was the hue of my shot: James wore a brown shirt over his white t-shirt, he has brown hair, and he has an olive-toned complexion. The table was brown and his sketchbook was beige. Plus, the overriding color in the posters behind him was beige as well. The result was an almost monotone brown shot with very little contrast. This was the exact opposite of what I needed: a shot that reflected James’s work, which is at once beautiful and powerful in its simplicity and use of contrast.

Depth of Field

I may have been able to create a more appealing shot of James had I tried to employ a shallow depth of field, where James appeared in sharp focus and the background—the posters—were subtly blurred. Professional cinematographers consciously control the depth of field of their shots, while amateurs tend to ignore it—if they even know what it is!

In short, depth of field refers to the range of distance from the camera that is in focus for a given shot. Depth of field is said to be deep when everything in a shot—foreground, midground, and background—is all in focus. In contrast, a shallow depth of field is one where only selected objects in the frame are in focus.

Small format video tends to offer a deep depth of field—everything is equally in focus. As a result, people sometimes refer to the video image as flat. In contrast, most Hollywood movies employ a shallow depth of field to guide the viewer’s attention to specific areas of the frame—typically the protagonist, against an artfully blurred background.

This shallow depth of field can be achieved in video. As mentioned in “Getting Started,” there are two and only two controls that affect DOF—on any camera. In order of importance, these are:

• The focal length of the lens—the longer/ more “zoomed-in” the lens, the shallower the depth of field. In other words, to achieve a shallower DOF you can move your camera far away from your subject and zoom in on the subject.
• The iris—the more open the iris/lower the F-stop, the shallower the depth of field. Since opening the iris brightens the image, you might have to counter this by using a neutral density filter or lowering the lights.
• Achieving a shallow depth of field also requires a fair amount of space—both between the camera and the subject, and between the subject and the background.

Losing a Day in Vain

I spent an entire afternoon working on a rough cut of the footage. I’d already completed the spots on Stefan Sagmeister and Paula Scher, so I figured taking the same approach with the Victore piece—focusing equally on James and his work—would be smart.

At least it was familiar ground. But it wasn’t working. The composition of my shot wasn’t compelling. Not only was the shot bad, I had blown the interview, too. I’d asked closed questions, and that made it difficult for James to reply with complete answers. For example, I’d said things like, “James, I really like that you put up your own rent money to print and post political posters. It seems like you’re really committed to the power that design can have.” I should have just said, “James, tell me about your Columbus Day poster.” This could have yielded a much richer and more interesting response from the artist.

I went home frustrated, worn out, and a little depressed. I didn’t think I’d be able to make anything worthwhile from what I had, and I was angry with myself for wasting so much of my and James’s time. I showed the rough to my wife anyway, hoping she could shed some light on the problem—sometimes a fresh pair of eyes can work wonders. Unfortunately, she only reinforced what I already thought: the footage simply wasn’t any good.

Christina said that, although she was intrigued by James’s work, she couldn’t see any resolution to the spot’s problem. She could see how exhausted I already was at work, and suggested that I should maybe chalk this one up to experience and move on. At the very least, I knew I needed the rest of the night off. So we put our son to bed and fired up a DVD, not at all expecting what came next.

Learning from Fellini

That night we watched La Dolce Vita, Federico Fellini’s 1960 black-and-white epic about a vacuous, celebrity-obsessed subculture in postwar Italy. Towards the end, Christina commented on the importance of the film being shot in black and white, and said it wouldn’t have been nearly as good if it were in color. I asked her why, and her answer summarized the film perfectly: “The movie is about the whore and the Madonna, primitivism and modernity, rootlessness and faith,” she said. “That’s why everything has to be black and white. It’s the contrasts between opposites.”

Although I’d seen La Dolce Vita many times before, the solution to my spot on James became clear during the last scene of Fellini’s film. The final scene takes place at a beach, with everyone dressed in either black or white. The juxtaposition of beach, water, and sky accentuates the starkness of the shot even further. A shallow flume—a small tributary in which water runs out to sea—separates the leading man, who’s been corrupted by the culture that surrounds him and is dressed all in white, and a comparatively virtuous woman, wearing a simple, black dress. It’s a beautiful, sparse shot. And above all, it fully supports Christina’s theory about contrasts.

A note on art direction

Directing is all about choices. Fellini and the film’s art director, Piero Gherardi, chose to end La Dolce Vita with two characters—a man and a woman—on a beach, standing a hundred yards apart, divided by a river. They chose to use no loud patterns or colors, just a white suit for the man and a black dress for the woman.

 I’ve always been aware of art direction in filmmaking, but until recently I never gave it enough attention in my own work. As with the Victore spot, I’d always start a given project believing I would find a suitable location for each shot. I rarely scouted locations or brought an art director.

Granted, you can’t always scout a location or hire an art director. When shooting documentaries, for example, you’re often filming on the run and chasing the action wherever it might go. But even documentaries can benefit enormously from basic art direction—even something as simple as placing a black backdrop behind your subject

A Second Chance

Inspired by the final scene of La Dolce Vita, I wanted to call James and ask if we could do a re-shoot. I’d have sit him in the middle of his studio—dressed in all white or all black—and clear the space around the shot. Then I’d ask a number of open questions and just let it roll. But the more I thought about this, the less feasible it seemed; both of us were way too busy for another shoot.

This left me back where I started, with 30-odd minutes of problematic footage. Still, I knew I was close to a solution; I just didn’t know what it was yet. The night was still relatively young. So with La Dolce Vita fresh in mind, I poured myself a glass of wine, put my iPod on random, and lay on the couch with the lights off. I thought about the film and my own project, and when Mogwai’s song “Sine Wave” came on, my imagination hit its stride.

Like most of Mogwai’s songs, “Sine Wave” starts low and mellow, and then builds to a dissonant crescendo. It consists of a warm, basic chord progression on a keyboard, coupled with a static, harsh percussion track. In fact, the song sounds just like James Victore’s work looks: stark, dissonant, and above all, beautiful. Victore’s work, like the Mogwai song, consists of just a few strokes that, taken collectively, build on one another to convey powerful, often jarring messages. Like Fellini’s film, the song gave my imagination a jumpstart, setting me back on track.

I decided to lay the song down in the audio track of Final Cut Pro and re-cut the rough using “Sine Wave” as my guide. This time I would minimize the interview footage and rely more heavily on images of James’s work. In short, I would create a kind of music video, comprised mainly of James’s beautiful and compelling designs, interspersed with a few carefully selected clips from the interview.

It worked. I was able to use the song’s intrinsic drama to set the right mood for the spot, and also to reinforce its theme—sort of a political David and Goliath idea—with graphic design as James’s sling and stone, offering an alternative to mainstream corporate and political propaganda.

The Mogwai song was also perfect because, being only three minutes long, it allowed me to re-envision the spot as a much shorter piece than the others in the series. Additionally, because the song starts very small and focused, but ends big and cacophonous, it guided my editing process as well. I married the song’s rhythm to the visual rhythm in James’s designs: brush strokes and paint splatters, black against white, disparate elements building to create a singular vision.

With this new approach, where I privileged the rhythms of the work and the song, I was able to use only the best sections from my interview footage. The final edit contains only four or five brief shots of James speaking. But I did lay his voice track over shots of his designs and studio space. Using just the voice track allowed me to cut a lot of the “ummms” and “ahhs” and splice together shorter and more concise responses, while at the same time to minimize my reliance on the uninteresting shot of James at his table.

Although the piece was coming together, I still had the color problem in the footage of James to deal with. No matter what I did in color correction, I couldn’t increase the contrast in my muddy, brown footage. So, inspired by Fellini, I pulled the color altogether. Changing the shot to black and white allowed me to bump up the contrast. Moreover, it made thematic sense: the shot became a bit more spartan, further reflecting James’s work.

A note on using tape

DV tape is cheap, and if you’re involved in an intense interview, you’ll kick yourself endlessly for missing gems you’ll never be able to recover or recreate. One of the best parts of the interview with James was when he said, “I know my work is going to piss people off.” This would have been a brilliant quote to use in the spot, but I didn’t catch it because I’d let my tape run out.

Get in the habit of checking the time code, which you’ll find on the viewfinder or pop-out screen, and also make a habit of switching tapes well before they have a chance to run out. I generally pull a tape anywhere from five to seven minutes before it’s supposed to end. But this time I was so enthralled with the interview that I forgot and lost the moment.

Other things to keep in mind with tape:

• Slide the “record protect” tab after you’ve shot to protect the tape from accidentally being recorded over.
• Make sure to label tapes.
• Make sure to keep them away from magnetic objects like speakers or the cell phone in your pocket.
• If a project is particularly important, consider cloning the tape—make a digital copy of it for backup. It’s cheap insurance.

Treating Still Images

For the Victore spot, like the others for this Adobe series, I wanted to highlight the artist’s work. So I requested digital images from James’s studio. Since the designers I’d shot up to this point were all print designers, I always got high-quality, print-ready images—usually 300 DPI (dots per inch) and in CMYK color mode, which is the mode required for the printing process. For computer screens, though, the highest resolution possible is 72 DPI and the color mode for video editing is RGB. Reconciling these two formats—incorporating digital files into a DV movie—is a multistage process.

First I open all of the images in Photoshop and convert them from CMYK to RGB and save them in a “HiRes” folder within my project folder. Then I take those RGB images and knock the resolution down to 72 DPI and save them into a folder called “LoRes.” It’s important to have both Hi- and LoRes versions of the images you use. As I mentioned above, I relied heavily on the actual brushstrokes in James’s work, building momentum in a sequence that eventually reveals a given poster in its entirety. So I used the HiRes files for the close-ups, and saved the LoRes files for revealing the full image.

Another major issue when using digital files in DV has to do with the shape of pixels. On a computer screen, images are represented by square pixels, but with digital video, images are represented by rectangular pixels. This can cause odd sizing issues and weird proportions when you try to import images created on a computer into a digital editing program.

For example, a perfect circle created in Photoshop with a document size of 720 by 480 (the standard size of a DV image) appears as an oval when imported into your editing program. The trick is to set your document size in Photoshop to 720 by 534, instead of 720 by 480. When I knock the resolution down to 72 DPI, the size of the image changes, too, and that’s when I fit the new image into the 720 by 534 document size. The example below is a poster, taller than it is wide, so I set the height to 534 and let the width be determined by that. If the image were wider than it was tall I could have set the width to 720 and let the height be automatically determined.

In short, you want to size your image to either 720 or 534. With Photoshop CS, there is an advanced option, when creating a new document, to choose between square and DV (rectangular) pixels. It also includes the ability to preview an image as it will appear on the screen with a command called Pixel Aspect Ratio Correction.

The Edit

This edit was all about working the images, sound, and live action together in a way that made sense, where each component complemented and strengthened the others. Because I was trying to minimize the live action shots and maximize the stills of James’s work—all the time paying close attention to rhythm—it was crucial for me to identify the beat of the music and cut to it. I alternated between hard cuts on the beat and cuts slightly in front of or behind the beat.

In addition to making the components mesh, I also wanted to convey the visceral power of James’s work, and the immediacy of his approach. No complicated processes or technological filters stand between James and his designs. His tools are simple and few: markers and pens, paper, and his own mind. He has an idea, and boom—it’s on the page. To capture that immediacy, I decided to occasionally stray from the beat altogether, following my own intuition while remaining guided by the music and James’s work.

The result was a clear connection between the cuts and the beat, without the spot becoming predictable or rigid. I decided not to use effects or transitions—such as dissolves, fades, or wipes—because such technical refinement would have been counter to the aesthetic of James’s work. Hard cuts were simply more appropriate, and they helped me pay more attention to the film’s rhythm.

In Sum

One problem with shooting documentaries is that you can get lost in the immediacy. With James Victore, I neglected to step back, give myself time, and find the right shot. It’s as if I felt I had to perform the role of a quick and decisive filmmaker. I thought—as I often do—that if I’d slowed down and taken time choosing the absolute right shots, then James and his crew would get impatient, and worse, might think I didn’t know what I was doing. But in my haste, I came away with footage that was just sub-par.

I’m glad I kept at it, though. What seemed like a disaster one minute became the start of a new project—one that was perhaps better than my original idea. It was a matter of letting go of my initial vision for the spot and recognizing the possibilities inherent in the footage I had.

As the saying goes, you have to lose yourself in order to find yourself—or in cases like this—lose the story to find the story.

Interestingly enough, the short I did on James Victore was actually turned down by Adobe because they felt he was too subversive and political for their corporate image—yet it got thousands of views thanks to community sites such as newstoday.com, BD4D.com, and the growing network of blogs. I mention this to stress that you don’t always need corporate sponsorship to make an impact. Moreover, you should never scrap a project just because it’s not what you first imagined. It can oftentimes be much more.