By Lee Sherman

What do British style magazines from the 1980s, the Japanese illustrator Tadanori Yokoo, and Japanese pop music have in common?

The answer, as seen in the art of motion-graphics house twenty2product is the ability to juxtapose seemingly diverse elements into a seamless whole. By using type as a graphical element, freely mixing eastern and western traditions in the manner of a hip-hop DJ, and ditching Disney-like frame-by-frame animation for video montage, twenty2product's creative partners, Terry Green and Nori-zo Tolson, have created a visual language all their own.

It's not exactly your typical tale of East meets West. For one thing, the Japanese influences are more likely to come from designer Green than from animator Tolson. The pair started twenty2product in the summer of '87, a nascent era in motion graphics, in an attempt to gain more control over both their artwork and their lives.

Abandoning the high-priced post-production suites for cheaper and more malleable desktop tools, Green and Tolson found they could do post-production, composting, and visual effects on the desktop. "There used to be these impenetrable monoliths called video post production houses and advertising agencies," remembers Tolson. "Now we find people are starting to break out of that mold. They know they can access that creative directly."

Green and Tolson's home brew studio consists of three Macs and a digital video capture station with the ability to dub to betacam sp, VHS, hi-8, and 3/4-inch tape. Their digital paintbox consists of AdobePhotoshop, Adobe After Effects, and Adobe Premiere.

"The way we work is very much affected by how the technology has changed," says Tolson. "Before, we did storyboards. And then we would go into video post-production houses and tell them what to build. As the desktop software made it possible for us to work at home, we were able to change the way we worked."

The next step was to use Adobe Photoshop to build elements, masks, and type that could be brought into post. The last reason to leave home was eliminated with the arrival of After Effects. They could now import their Photoshop files directly into After Effects to animate them. "Because we have a background in delivering things for video, we tend to think in terms of large blocks of colors and flat lines," says Green. "We like to build things out of big chunky parts."

The ability to apply a transparency or a different kind of opacity to a film sequence is crucial to the layered look of Green and Tolson's compositions. After Effects 3D transforms are often used to get from one place in a montage to another. "Almost all of our work in Premiere is done using layers, rather than track A and B the way film is," explains Tolson. "It's kind of challenging getting this stuff to work together. It's often a series of visual non-sequiters. They are not telling any kind of narrative story and yet somehow they need to transition to each other. We'll have five or six sketches that we are going to be traveling through. I'll think how would I get from here to there. That suggests different kinds of animations. But it doesn't have to just move across the screen. It can move in x, y, z. dimensions."

Green and Tolson regularly finish each other's sentences, an indication of their fluid working relationship. Green is the man behind twenty2product's strong sense of composition. It's that compositional sense that has found the duo work as interface designers for Nike and NEC, among others. "Terry suffers from obsessive compulsive disorder, so he's found a career that supports that" laughs Tolson. "He's got his CDs in alphabetical order and when it comes to a design, he just keeps pushing things around until they are where they need to be. He spends a lot of time getting things to look and feel right."

Even Green's flat artwork appears to move, suggesting possibilities for animation. For Tolson, setting these images to motion is not unlike composing a piece of music. "There's a range to what we do but it's always going to sound like us," she says.