Before illustrators were professional artists working on deadline and caffeine, they were once painstakingly trying to figure out how to make a nose look right, how to make the brush leave the marks they wanted, how to make fur look like fur without drawing every single hair. Though with time and effort their skills will render the nose, the fur, and the paintbrush half the challenges they once were, the question of “how do I draw?” will follow illustrators into their careers, even after many technical aspects of drawing are hardly a problem.

While every illustration presents a unique creative challenge, sometimes a project is also sufficiently outside the illustrator’s usual “alley.” And that’s when things get interesting — an unfamiliar subject means the illustrator cannot rely on many of the well-rehearsed tricks in their bag.

…which is actually primally terrifying. The “bag of tricks” is a parachute in a world in which there is often no time to risk or mess up. But it’s okay — there is nothing illustrators love more than terror, stress, and sleep-deprivation, else we wouldn’t be in the field! Onward!

The illustration task for Chimps Should Be Chimps, an innovative iPad children’s book we are developing for the Lincoln Park Zoo, presented such a challenge for me. As much as I love animals and the lushness of a rainforest, those subjects have been nigh nonexistent in my artistic work thus far. But, the realization of “I have no idea how to draw this” is actually very healthy — it forces you to go back to square one and really research it and learn, much like the way you once learned to draw as a youngster.

With that, I headed to the zoo with a big sketchbook and did nothing more than draw the heck out of chimpanzees, with a big clumsy unerasable brush pen. I drew them sitting; I drew them dangling by their foot off of the chain link fence; I drew them scratching each other’s butts. I watched and read information about them, too, but I mostly kept trying to draw them, never erasing or spending more than a few seconds to a few minutes on each sketch.

It is easy to think that simply photographing the subject in a variety of poses would capture much more information with much less effort. But, while photography can be very creative and artistic, it is most useful to an illustrator as a direct reference for technical/temporal information — for example, the layout of the exhibit, the lighting in it, the time of day, the number of chimpanzees inside, what they are doing. The (admittedly stressful) experience of trying to record them flying through the air, jumping, resting, and every shape in between, even with the incomplete skewed haphazard marks, does a tremendous amount for really seeing things, just as they hit you.

I put the drawings away afterward. Having made them in the moment had done its job, replenishing my lack of familiarity with the idiosyncrasies of chimpanzees. I could now draw them, technically; but how I was going to draw them was the more relevant and difficult question that now lay ahead. (A drawing of a chimpanzee for the National Geographic would have very different character than a drawing of a chimpanzee for a newspaper cartoon, and different still for a children’s book.) Whatever it was, it would need to be reconciled with the story and my own artistic style, but also the time constraints — and therein lies the rub.

Stay tuned!

To learn more about Chimps Should Be Chimps, visit our webpage or sign up for our newsletter.

“A Girl Story” is a unique new inspiration for a philanthropic campaign.  It’s based on a series of short animated YouTube clips that are seamlessly linked together.  The film series progressed scene by scene as donors made contributions to the Mahindra Foundation to help provide education to under-privileged girls.  This engagement is really an innovative alternative to the traditional passive video solicitation that non-profits have used in the past.

Okay.  I loved the original Star Wars trilogy.  I made a feature-length spoof of A New Hope my junior year of high school and I roped my friends into an even more elaborate spoof of Episode V the next year.  When the new trilogy came out, I was the first one in line to get into the theater at the first midnight showing (for all three of them, sadly). Recently, I saw a set of YouTube videos that cherry-pick Episode I apart (should be noted that I’m not endorsing these—I wish he could have stuck to the reviewing and skipped the “I’m a psycho” parts). It was all reasonable criticism, and I’m well aware that I enjoyed Phantom Menace only because I saw it with so many like-minded fans that we skimmed over the failings and cheered together when the sand people took potshots at the pod racers and the Jawas bleated around the first corner.  After high school I studied film because my father said to go into something I enjoyed doing.  I learned to pick apart what I saw on the screen, as this is how they teach you to make films: reverse engineering. It didn’t particularly take, I guess, but with that in hand I can laugh at Espisode I when no one can figure out how to live-act among a fake world and it’s worse than Mark Hamil’s audition tape for Episode IV.  But I’m getting off track…

I went into the theater to see Avatar with my comically-large polarized 3D specs and literally said out loud to my pal “I’m more curious than excited.”  I was.  I was expecting it to feel like Episode I makes me feel now.  I was also preloaded with an inherent inability to accept CG as reality, a distaste for a movie that cost so much money and about which I had heard so much negativity, and a really powerful dislike for the Papyrus typeface (another pedigree standard). When the cat-ball thing from Alice In Wonderland accosted the audience in a goofy display of 3D depth-of-field I thought “I’m going to have a hard time just paying attention to the story if the 3D is this much of a novelty.” When the first voice-over broke the silence I groaned a bit and I remember thinking, “this is going to be more Episode I than Episode IV.”  In fact, I did a lot of thinking… right up until a few minutes in, when my disbelief was suspended, willingly or not, and, aside from a few pinholes where the convergence of my film school training and my love of referential material colluded me, I didn’t start thinking again until I saw a key grip’s name partway through the credits.  At that point, the reality made me smile as much as any part of the story. Avatar is the film I’ve been waiting to see since May 1999, and it’s brilliant.

I love stories. That’s not terribly insightful about me. How about this: when I was young, my sister used to get mad because I would interrupt her singing along to her favorite songs to ask her what the lyrics meant. I like things that have meaning.  I like stories that have something to share, be it superficial, hidden, or, ideally, both.  I loved Mononoke Hime from the moment I saw it, almost two years before it was released in the U.S., subtitled by a fan and bootlegged to a group of true-believers.  When it came to the U.S. I begged the curator-plenipotentiary (can’t believe I remember that) of the local theater to show it. Whether or not I had anything to do with it, when he did I was there opening night and, despite the second-rate dubbing, it was great.  It was as unapologetic as Miyazaki films always are, and bared its thematic soul plainly and powerfully.  In Avatar‘s story there lives the same touch that Miyazaki always brings to his films (and more than a few direct references to his work). The film is understandable because it’s themes are simple; it’s powerful because they are gracefully omnipresent.  Even the love story that threads its way around the film is never out of reach but also never a distraction.  As with all good sci-fi, and to the detriment of an even greater quantity of poorly-executed sci-fi, the thematic archetypes are not at all transparent in this film.  The bad guys and good guys are clearly delineated, the character arcs and transformations aren’t hiding, and the three acts might as well have title screens between them.  But I don’t know how else to say it: I didn’t stumble over those things—the way I stumbled over the glowing, orange, 3D papyrus subtitles D:—I embraced them, and, for me, that’s unusual if not impossible (notable exception: Last Crusade).  In fact, campy or not, I don’t even have any comments about the acting or anything like that; the acting was good… or maybe appropriate is a better term.  I mean, I’m sure if I was pressed I could write a few things but it just seems to incidental to the theme and the story. This film was an unfailing vehicle for those.

Despite it’s sci-fi trappings, and despite the CG, and even flying directly in the face of my (and apparently so many others’) predisposition against it, the film brought me the same sense that a great novel does, and something that no film I’ve seen in the theater perhaps ever has: it made me believe unreservedly in the world in front of me and experience some raw emotion tied to it.  It wasn’t a film about 22nd century AD human life, it was a film about some foreign experience where the details had an almost Tolkein-esque life of their own.  Okay, there were definitely moments where it took a pause to indulge itself in the local flora and fauna, and to explore the capabilities of CG with regard to realism (and blue skin), but taking that in stride (and even with only a few hours to do it) there existed on the screen a fully-developed world that didn’t fall apart under (even my) scrutiny but, rather, had subtleties waiting to be noticed in the wake of a story that would have stood on its own being read aloud. Not the kind of details that are intended to jump out and say “hey, I’m a detail, look how well I sell this story,” but actual details that just exist because they do. I ate it up.  To me, that’s successful sci-fi and I just haven’t seen it lately.  Actually, I thought I had out-grown and out-learned my ability to just be immersed without picking things apart… or thinking about the quality of the theater seats… or wondering how many takes something required.  I really thought that the awe I utterly failed to explain to my mom after coming home late from middle school because I had stuck around to watch a bootlegged copy of Nausicaä was something I couldn’t experience again with the perception of a (sort of) adult and the jaded filtration associated with having scrutinized the filmmaking process. I was totally wrong.

At this point I have to acknowledge that there were moments where, against my will—as in fact my disbelief was suspended so strongly that it was on house arrest—my mind left the story for a few moments at a time.  I love things that are referential, subtly or even somewhat less so.  I’m well aware that much of what I saw as outwardly referential in Avatar could be, at best, unintentional or generally unnoticed, or, at worst, mis-observed.  But to me it was awesome.  As I’ve alluded, there’s no shortage of thematically and aesthetically similar material out there, but the references I noticed seemed hand-picked for me and from beloved sources.  My jaw literally uncontrollably dropped when the otherwise complementary, though a bit heavy-handed at times, score side-stepped into strains of Philip Glass’ theme to Naqoyqatsi, jarringly evoking thoughts of a certain human future at which Avatar hints throughout. And I couldn’t help but imagine, at one point, a certain debriefing taken in by a young Skywalker which described his bombing target as being of a certain size.  Even nods to Miyazaki’s great works seemed prevalent in the way the forest came together.  I know I keep mentioning him and his works, but I honestly looked for his name in the credits because it felt so much like a live-action work of his—the imagination, the theme… As a side note: with so many people working on so many aspects of Avatar, as one will notice watching the credits for a half minute, I wonder if everyone was of a like mind because of the story, the director, or serendipity… Anyway, the parallels I detected and enjoyed were so pleasing between this film and other works I love that I would want nothing more than to sit and list them to get feedback. Maybe I’ll write a spoiler-alert-laden guide later so others can chime in to correct and continue what I noticed.  In the place of that, for now, let me just say that I have almost certainly never seen a sci-fi flick be put together with, in my immensely humble opinion, such an auteur filmmaker’s care, the likes of which is usually reserved for things that wind up putting a little golden statue in someone’s deserving hands. Whew, I’m out of control.

It’s noteworthy, too, that despite my concern, I found that the 3D didn’t take away from the film at all. At times, driven by the curiosity of someone interested in filmmaking, I wondered about it and peeped at the edges of the frame, trying to see how it influenced depth of field.  In general, though, I wonder if it didn’t achieve two things for me.  Something about the effect definitely creates an almost imperceptible blur as you look deeper into the frame and I have a feeling this went a long way to helping me gloss over my usual faulting of CG: it’s round-peg-to-square-hole, over-sharpened look that fails to really simulate the human eye’s usual modus.  In addition to that, I think it may actually have drawn me more into the story by making the movie world feel at once more new and alien (bear in mind that before tonight I was a modern 3D virgin) and more, yes dang it, immersive.  I feel like I’ve just used the word “proactive” in a sentence or something, but it’s true: I felt more immersed than I think I would have looking at the film in two dimensions, even if it were super-duper-IMAX quality.  It’s for this reason that I really think everyone who’s going to see it (which should probably be everyone, I’m just saying) should see it in the theatre.  I’m pretty sure it’s not going to translate to 2D all that great, let alone 2 feet.

Well, anyway, I’ve found it hard to really describe my reaction to the film without giving anything about it away but, as I’ve stated, I think it’s important to hold back. I still think a lot of Avatar‘s potential power rests on its ability to continually draw you in by essentially surprising you.  And I know that this all seems a little hyperbolic, but that’s honestly how I came away from the film feeling. I’ve wanted a fantasy movie to make me feel that way on the big screen since I read my first novel in the genre as a wee one.  I’ve wanted a cinema-going experience to rekindle my love both of films and of stories and this one has. So maybe what I wrote wasn’t so much a review as a response, and with that in mind maybe I can say what I’ve really been thinking, and what I said on the phone to several people and will probably keep saying and be forced to keep defending for a long time, perhaps even to the next generation of movie goers when they get old enough to listen (or not listen as the case may be):

I think this film is our generation’s Star Wars. It’s the first movie to take a genre and a style and a vision and hitch them to a story the telling—and theme—of which actually make me proud.  I wholeheartedly admit that it might be because I care about the genre and the theme and I like love stories (so there!), but I’m really glad this film was made and I don’t think I’ve been able to say that about a a film, whether I liked it or not, in a long time, and certainly not one that I got to see on the big screen. And, just for posterity (and for the sake of TL;DR) here is my 140-character-limited-and-therefore-culturally-significant, immediate response to the film as I walked out:

“Go. See. It. Now. Stop what you’re doing, find a 3D showing, and GO. If you don’t see Avatar in a theater in 3D you will regret it.”

The Holiday Card

Now that ‘Holiday Season ‘08’ is in the bag, it’s probably as good a time as any to wax philosophical about our holiday E-card. This year’s concept stemmed from a colorful conversation that included a retelling of some of the more infamous moments from Manning parties past, as well as a discussion about office party clichés. With a little Photoshop magic and a few hundred hours of work, what emerged was a bizarre virtual party that combined celebrities, pop-culture references, employee debauchery, and more than a little alcohol. But we got there aided by using content that was ‘borrowed’.

If you happened to visit the site, have a pulse and even a slight sense of humor, you’ll probably agree that the final result was at least mildly entertaining. Or anyway, we were fairly proud of it. But when you really think critically about what makes the site successful (and since we hope to eventually get better at what we do, we try to do this once in a while) you can’t help but realize that the amusement has its foundations in a lot of shared cultural experiences.

Drawing on Culture

In our postmodern, pop-culture devouring society, customs like Christmas have taken on a sometimes perverse universality. (The perversion is driven largely by a strong commercial undercurrent, but that’s probably another discussion entirely.) So in America in 2008, shoppers in Miami have their holiday cheer whipped into a frenzy by Bing Crosby’s ‘White Christmas’ just the same as their counterparts in Montana. Never mind that there’s a good chance that the Floridians have never actually experienced a snow-covered December 25^th—they know that Christmas is supposed to be white. Americans’ idyllic notions of the holiday season have become something of a mash-up between personal memories and inherited cultural memes.

You don’t have to take my word for it. ‘A Christmas Story’, the most sugar-coated, nostalgic vignette of Christmas Americana ever put to film, has become a cultural staple. During the 2007 version of TBS’ annual airing of a 24-hour marathon of the movie, over 45 million viewers tuned in. That’s 15% of the population tuning in for something on cable.

It’s this shared awareness of Christmas iconography that allowed us to give our friends and clients a good laugh. Because mixed in with hard-drinking employees, angry snowmen, and the president-elect were references to ‘A Christmas Story’, ‘The Nutcracker’, ‘A Christmas Carol’, ‘The Grinch’ and others.

Creativity, Originality

Here’s the twist: As ‘creatives’, we’re supposed to endeavor to come up with unique and original solutions to our clients’ and our own design challenges. When we do so, we are credited with ownership of the resulting product. It’s this premise that protects the value of our business. Similarly, copyright law protects the creators of the Christmas classics listed previously.

But at the same time, if our goal is to give people a holiday-inspired laugh, would we be leaving something on the table by not referencing pop culture?It was our opinion that indeed we would be. So to create our holiday party, we borrowed heavily from existing (and most likely copyrighted) material.

Is this practice acceptable? Since our intent was primarily to create art (whether or not this term an apt description is up for debate) and not to realize financial gain, we took the position that our use of copyrighted material was ok. Had the original creators of this material decided our work was financially or artistically threatening, we would have gladly pulled the plug. But it was our belief that what we created stood on its own as a unique form of expression.

We Didn’t Start the Fire

From Dada collages and ready-mades to Andy Warhol’s ‘Soup Cans’, we are by no means the first to explore this artistic grey area. But the rise of the desktop computer, the internet, and the availability of media via applications like YouTube and peer-to-peer file sharing has allowed virtually anyone to enter this arena. I thought it might be interesting to explore some other examples of this process. And by far, the easiest place to find this work being done in contemporary culture is in the music world.

Danger Mouse

In 2004, a producer by the name of Danger Mouse released the ‘Grey Album’—with songs created by using bits of The Beatles’ ‘White Album’ with a-capella verses from rapper Jay-Z’s 2003 disc ‘The Black Album’. Danger Mouse knew from the outset that he’d never be able to score legal rights to pursue this project, but the internet allowed him to distribute his work and it became a huge hit.

[flv:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zJqihkLcGc 425 324]

Although he made no money directly for his work on ‘The Grey Album’, he has since parlayed the notoriety it earned him into a successful career as a music producer. Along with rapper/singer Cee-Lo, he forms one half of the Grammy-winning group ‘Gnarls Barkley’. (Even the group name is ironically referential.) He has also released records as part of the British super-group ‘The Good, The Bad, and the Queen’, and most recently produced Beck’s newest record.

Girl Talk
Another producer, Greg Gillis, takes things to even more of an extreme. Under the name ‘Girl Talk’, Gillis has released dance-friendly albums of mash-ups that do not contain a single original note. Where most producers will use a sample as part of an original composition, Gillis creates songs by splicing together hundreds of samples. The result is a mind-blowing witches brew of top 40 songs mixed, mashed, and layered together into a cohesive whole.

[flv:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WK3O_qZVqXk 425 324]

Gillis’ work has appeared on ‘Best Albums of the Year’ lists and been critically acclaimed, but has also been called ‘a lawsuit waiting to happen’. So far he has avoided legal action, but his label has already prepared a defense based on a Fair Use argument. ‘Girl Talk’ has even been endorsed by a Pennsylvania congressman who is an advocate of Fair Use.

There Will Be Blood

In an example that bridges the gap between popular and classical music, the score for ‘There Will Be Blood’ was disqualified for Oscar contention in 2008 over issues of originality. The score, composed by Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood, was widely considered by critics to be one of the year’s best. Nearly 35 minutes of the film’s score was original composition, but 46 minutes consisted of Greenwood’s arrangements of songs in the public domain such as Brahms’ ‘Concerto in D Major’, along with some of his repurposed earlier compositions.

[flv:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HjWIr80ln4 425 324]

Sita Sings The Blues

The last example comes from the film world, but again regards music rights. Animator Nina Paley spent five years creating the film ‘Sita Sings the Blues’ which has gone on to critical acclaim. However, outside of the festival circuit, virtually no one has seen this film as its distribution is stuck in a legal gridlock over music usage rights.

Paley originally conceived of the idea for ‘Sita’ as a retelling of the Indian fable, Ramayana. The project was inspired by blues recordings by Annette Hanshaw, and much of the animation features musical numbers synchronized to these recordings.

[flv:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4wAA2eVXjo 425 324]

Some Indian groups are angry over Paley’s use of the Ramayana story, and the usage rights for the Hanshaw recordings are being withheld by the record company which owns them. So the film remains unable to find a distributor.

Paley admits that she knew ahead of time that there would be potential issues with the recordings. However, her argument centers on the fact that copyright laws in their current interpretation stifle creativity. She sees the fact that artists are required to consider such issues so thoroughly as a factor that potentially hampers the artistic process.

The lines regarding ownership and artistic freedom are sure to become more blurry as the availability of technology expands. But creativity does not exist in a vacuum, and the question remains: at what point is something sufficiently recontextualized to constitute an original work of art?

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