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Film Studios II
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Ninart Lui
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Exclusive Highlight on TAXI Design Network
Interview with Chip Houghton & Peter Frankfurt, Imaginary Forces
One interesting way of thinking about that question is to think about our own history and process of the company. We started doing main title sequences, and if you think about it, movies are the first examples of experience design where you get a whole group of people in a dark room and get them to suspend disbelief, and they are expecting a story so you better tell them a story. Where we’ve gone is say, let's take that scale of story and tell them in a different medium or platform – sometimes where stories are expected, sometimes the story’s a surprise and maybe a delight – that’s how we started. Some of our first projects were programming a football stadium, and during a project with IBM where we were creating something for client briefings which was traditionally very dry and all business, we took the whole expectation of IBM customers from the minute they got into the elevator by using design and architecture because architecture is an extremely valuable tool in story telling – that was a kind of revelation for us.
There are a lot of different ways to look at that question – what drives experience design is just the way people are experiencing messages and stories and brands. We come from the filmmaking title and the marketing of those films. We come from commercial production working with traditional ad agencies and what we have seen is that – oh my god - there’s so many other ways of interacting with the audience so we'd better think out of the box because if we just look at a computer screen or movie screen or television screen, we’re really limiting ourselves in terms of both expressing a brand and telling a story and interacting with those audiences. We were attracted in terms of exploring this idea of combining architecture and the medium of storytelling and idea of scale because a movie screen is big but stadium is bigger, and why just have a screen when you can have an entire building or exterior or interior of a building? The other thing that’s happened is attracting people’s attentions and technology and changing so many of the tools for showing media and delivering stories, is that it could be the inside of a building, or the exterior of the building, it could be a weather balloon that’s showing the image, it could be a giant hologram or a water feature – it’s anything and everything.
It’s a fantastic palette to be able to play with. With the explosion of development you’re seeing now with Sentosa and projects going on in Sentosa, Singapore; what’s going on in Macau and Vegas and Dubai. Truly spectacular, very highly mediated experiences are being received and being built. It’s a great time to be doing this.
TAXI >>Does being an early practitioner of experience design put you in the forefront and therefore, in a prominent position to shape perceptions and experience design itself?
Imaginary Forces>>I think that the whole communication in the design field has moved so quickly, and is so self-reflective, that everyone is always checking out what everybody else is doing. Being one of the earlier people doing what we’re doing obviously got us a lot of attention and clients, but there is just so much interesting work going on globally that I don’t think we have an advantage. We might have a momentary leadership, but then we’ll see something that makes us go “Oh my god, I wish we had done that”. There are so many interesting designers and animators at work today. I think the thing where we really had an advantage with was being able to build a team and vital network of really interesting collaborators – I think that has partly to do with our different geography, just where we are located. Being in LA and part of the movie business where there’s a lot of really interesting visual artists and storytellers, and also having an office in NY which is certainly a central location in the advertising world, and then having very strong relationships with extremely influential and progressive architects who are leading the idea of experience design as much as anyone is.
We are not an early practitioner of experience design – it’s been around forever – what we’re doing that’s different in terms of what we’re offering and how we’re looking at it is that we are in Hollywood, and our roots are from cinema so we’re sort of taking experience design in whatever form may be. Is it a building, is it outside, inside, interior, is it for entertainment or education or exhibit? And we tend to look at it from a cinematic point of view, so the way that we translate this into the solutions we come up with has an element of cinematic spectacle to it. So you’re sort of putting experience design through the IF filter or point of view of how we work with our clients, or the way we may want to help a studio introduce a big film that’s coming out in a year or two from now, or what can we tease out of that mark. Let’s do that also with the way somebody may experience a building in Times Square, or how somebody may experience an exhibit in a museum. It’s that aspect that we think is what’s new to what we’re doing. I think experience design has been around since forever – gladiators in the Colosseum, Catholic Church and all of that – so much involved in creating an experience. Everything from sounds and smells and architecture and content – and this is just our version of that.
TAXI >>I see Imaginary Forces placing a great deal of emphasis on stories. Is storytelling what makes the company tick?
Imaginary Forces>>It’s a process. We’re used to telling stories, that’s how we solve problems. That’s how we entertain and also how we define the kind of form that we do. IF is filled with wonderful designers and what we’ve found is you can have a super fantastic designer but if they don’t have an idea behind that design it all becomes fluff as a title sequence opening or even an experience design project where it’s just a bunch of pretty pictures but no one gives a damn about them. There isn’t a narrative to engage you or pull some emotion or give you some kind of insight or whatever it is so we always sit down in our early design process and just talk about the ideas – and all about what’s the best way of taking this concept and telling it in a way where people say, "Hey that’s great" or "Now I get it", or "Wow, I didn’t think about it that way". We talk about storytelling that’s a big part of our design process or product.
The content needs to be a unifying idea - content could be anything. Being able to understand what the animating idea of something is, and to be able to identify that and give it form. And also, by being relatively fearless in tackling technology issues and integration issues where things that haven’t been done or things that haven’t been combined before are a part of our tool set.
TAXI >>What is the game plan to morph into a multi-disciplinary entertainment and design agency like Imaginary Forces in less than 10 years?
Imaginary Forces>>Our game plan was really to be talented, ambitious and rigorous in the work that we do, and fearless in terms of going after projects that people wouldn’t normally associate with us – so if they thought that we could do motion design, we’d say, "Yeah, of course we could do motion design, but we should also be involved in the architecture". If they say can we do the title sequence, we’ll say, "We’ll do the title sequence but we’ll do the whole ad campaign too". We take multiple components – we don’t need to do it all, but certainly being an interesting collaborator is a major asset for us. We worked with Frank Gehry last year on Sentosa and he was able to talk to us about technology, about previous civilizations, interior experience, integrating all things that we can learn to do and so part of our game plan was to be very activist about trying new things and not screwing them up.
When we were forming IF, we went through some of the basic business plans of what’s our mission and what we’re going to be doing, which we haven’t looked at in 11 years and is sitting in a file somewhere – but we know that if we pull it out, what we do remember writing is "Look, this landscape, this communication entertainment landscape is morphing right in front of us". And this was back in 1996, and so things were really starting to crank up with the whole Internet companies that were popping up every moment and we could sense traditional ad agency structures were going to be different and so we said, "Look, we know we want really good design and want to have best absolute top A clientele out there, and be working with the best people in their professions – let’s figure out what we can do that we’re good at, but can translate into other ways in communicating and entertaining" - and it’s just literally been because we got this opportunity and it opened up doors or opportunities to work on the next project, and it was very difficult to swim up that stream because we had to constantly convince people we could help to come up with the solution even though maybe it wasn’t in our portfolio or something we have done already.
Also, it took some really big clients and a big gamble to go with us on that aspect, but what would happen is if you look at the stuff we’ve done before, they said "Jesus, that's pretty good stuff", and they’ll say, "Okay, now you guys make it happen for this", and that’s how we went from main title sequences and a little of feature marketing and advertising stuff into this much larger scope of services and opportunities. And it’s not "Uh oh, we’re working for Steven Spielberg, don’t screw up", or "Uh oh, we’re working for IBM, don’t screw up", and it’s just going down that road and fortunately we’ve been pretty lucky so far.
TAXI >>Imaginary Forces is also known for its brand invigoration prowess. How would you describe the Imaginary Forces brand?
Imaginary Forces>>We are a curious, innovative, reliable communications partner. We are really good at telling very complicated stories in a very simple way, very good at creating emotions and spectacle, and we’re really good at finding and protecting an idea through all the different forms that represent it.
TAXI >>Imaginary Forces has its finger in many pies — from feature film production to architecture, from corporate branding to entertainment marketing and promotion, from advertising interactive media. How do you grow the company without turning out to be a Jack-of-all trades?
Imaginary Forces>> Well we’re really a Jack of one trade, which is telling a really good story in a lot of different platforms. And also we’ve been able to get really talented people into the company - young, really talented and ambitious people, but many of whom are staff of the company and work there full time, and many of whom have their own things and collaborate with us on a regular basis. There are just so many really fabulous people and now with the web, you can connect globally basically 24 hours a day. We have someone who worked with IF for several years, and now moved back to Taipei, who we still work with relatively seamlessly. One of our designers just moved to Paris, but we still work with him regularly. By the same token we have collaborators from the UN Studio in Amsterdam and in Vienna which we work with on projects together. Again, I think the web and digital tools have made that kind of collaboration kind of transparent.
It is all about talent, and one of the reasons that we are able to work with the same talents for so long is that the company provides a lot of different opportunities for the creatives here – the creative directors, the designers, the producers, to all of the artists that work here, so you’ll see a creative production team working on something for Warner Brothers and the same team would be working on something for Frank Gehry and the developers for a competition and so they really get to experience a lot of different types of creative challenges and that’s what’s been going around here. They’re designed to be able to do everything – you’re not allowed to just do one thing. It’ll be kind of weird, everyone would look at that person and think what’s wrong with him!
TAXI >>Given your expertise, what is the rule to bear in mind in whatever media a designer works in?
Imaginary Forces>> Whatever you’re doing just do it the best you possibly can – effort and high standards count. You have to have the highest standards, and be harder on yourself than the client is. We apply that to basically everything that we do and it’s really a part of our culture – that’s creative, that’s production, that’s ethics, finance and all of those different components. We really are tough on ourselves to make sure we can exceed any expectation and that’s hard to do year in and year out with really top notch clients so Chip always uses all these sports metaphors, like, we’re a basketball team, we’re the national champion or world champion (Peter rolling eyes). These people go constantly from one project to the next and they find it inside them to pull it off for really, really difficult projects or really tough clients and love it and eat it up and go nuts about it, and if you can create an environment, a structure to support that, then that’s where the secret recipe brews. And if you have a little bit of control, the smart thing is to get out of the way and let all these people do what they do really well.
Also, one of the things is at any time we always have several projects going which are experimental and where process is not a consideration, which are interesting and fulfilling some other part of what our bottomline is, either to inspire us, or to feature something, or something that’s really cool to give back to the world. We’ve done a couple of things we’re really proud of and have a really positive effect – we’ve been communicating stuff we do with United Architects, we’re continuing to do stuff with UA and we have that kind of social relevance of one kind or another and we’re in the process of collaborating on an installation with MoMA, which is something we dreamt up ourselves and which MoMA could exhibit, but it’s the kind of thing the art directors, the editors and strategists can really put a lot into and not something anybody hired us to do. It’s something self-generated, and you know, hopefully to inspire people to believe in something but even if it doesn’t, the process in itself is innovating and inspiring, and the reward.
TAXI >>What is the WORD, which you think would reside and reverberate in the design world for the next 10 years?
Imaginary Forces>> Overlap. Things moving to create really interesting synergies and refractions.
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Exclusive Highlight on TAXI Design Network
Interview with Danny Yount, Prologue Films
Prologue Films>>I was self-taught in that I learned how to use the computer efficiently and make things look like good design rip-offs, but the art of visual communication was developed by learning from mentors in the workplace, which took years to development. The problem with a lot of design today is that our self-enabling computers have made us “digital artists” and “mo-graphers” - drunk on technology and ability but lacking in originality and good storytelling and design problem-solving, which many times is a product of restraint, not technique.
TAXI >>What is the line of thought & principles you adhere to when presented with & embarking on a new project?
Prologue Films>>A. That I am called to be a visual communicator first and an artist second. If I ignore former I do not go to the next round of discussions with the client. If I ignore the latter I have missed an opportunity to make something interesting and memorable.
B. I make sure that the right people are involved. I am very “hands-on” - I make a lot of my own design and animation, but I can only do so much so I get people involved who are passionate and talented – like my good friends DongHo Lee, Alex Hansen, Ilya Abulhanov, Dave Ridner, Eric Keller, Eric Anderson and Dan Brown and Dade Odgren. These are the people I have worked with over the years who have really been in the trenches with me and helped me make good things. I have learned from them and we have encouraged and inspired each other along the way.
TAXI >>You once stated in an interview that “Failure is a great teacher”. I admire that resilience and it certainly is a lot better than whining. In today’s ever changing landscape saturated with designers and their imaginations, I think failure is not an option or concept anymore. There is plenty to learn from – or hell, to copy from – but I think essentially everyone is learning what it means to have their own voice. As a designer who’s been involved since 1992 and one who successfully found his own, tell me your opinion on this booming industry and what it holds for the future.
Prologue Films>>If you are willing to challenge yourself you will eventually fail because you are human. That is how we all learn and stretch ourselves whether we admit that or not. And if you are not failing then you are probably not trying new things. What I love about this field is that it is fueled by innovation. So as long as designers are thinking and trying new things then there will be always be a future for graphic design. But it will die as an industry if it becomes self-absorbed or standardized. It’s really up to us.
TAXI >>No matter how intricate, I always sense a steady calm & elegance exuding from your designs. And this is consistent throughout all your designs from the titles for Kiss Kiss Bang Bang to he Invasion to The Grid. And who could forget the Emmy award-winning Six Feet Under titles? As creative director & creator, what is your personal process of inspiration & creation? How do you relate this vision to your team?
Prologue Films>>I just start with what needs to be communicated and then and try to find a good way to do that. And then I set out to try make something I will not regret or get bored of. I make storyboards and a motion example or edit if time allows. I use the opportunity to experiment and to learn something new and then I invite others to make it as good as we can with as few people as possible. Once it is accepted by the director I discuss the next stages with the team. If I do my job well then it becomes something that generates inspiration and collaboration within the team. People get excited about it and it ends up better than where it started. When that happens it is a very rewarding process.
TAXI >>You’ll be speaking at the upcoming AGIdeas conference in Australia! We’re terribly excited. Also, we’re going to be really bold to ask – what is incorporated in your speech that is different from the rest of the speakers? Everyone has a different opinion & a different style, but inspiration itself is difficult to mold. Please do share with us your take on inspiring the new generation and passing on the wisdom to success.
Prologue Films>>I will be speaking to a large group of very established designers and then to students. To the students I will share with them what has inspired me and what I have learned along the way and show work. The larger group will hear less about myself and more about the work in general. I did not take lessons from Tony Robbins but every now and then I have some things to say that help others gain insight or confirm what they have already learned. For me speaking is an organic process – when I try to follow a script I mess it up. What I try to do instead is show things that will inspire the younger generation as well as remind them that design is design – there are principles that are absolute and constant and I try to remind them of that.
TAXI >>What are the best and worst memories of your being a designer in the industry?
Prologue Films>>Best:
- Getting my first professional design job.
- Being told by a film director I admire that my work is great.
- Directing a shoot at an exotic location.
Worst:
- Working 3 days straight.
- Receiving threats and insults by clients.
- Being told by a film director I admire that my work is terrible.
TAXI >>Prologue has an expansive base of work including film, television and other media like video game main titles, upheld by great vision & passionate progress. As a creative director working with a “body with many parts” (stated on your site), how do you handle the creativity that flows through the company daily?
Prologue Films>>We divide work up in a way that benefits anyone who is inspired to make it good. You can not do that by forcing people who would not be interested. That is not always unavoidable but we do our best to make sure everything is a good fit so that the project gets the care it needs. We also hire the most talented people we can find – from all disciples and from all over the world. With a group like that there is a lot of diversity and a healthy exchange of ideas and perspectives.
TAXI >>What is one thing you feel you could change in the industry right now?
Prologue Films>>It would be pretentious of me to try to guess what that thing would be, but one thing I would like see changed someday is my commute. I think it would be great to have virtual working environments and design communities where the interaction and accountability is the same (with the exception of being able to physically touch someone, of course). For me personally that means that I would be able to control a lot of things I cannot right now – like the distance form my family or office noise pollution. I would be able to process ideas more easily and clearly and have a better balance in life I think. The other thing I would want to change is to see an Oscar category for main titles (how vain of me, right?).
TAXI >>I can’t resist, so I have to ask – if you were designing a title opening for your life, give us the brief on how would it go?
Prologue Films>>I would have to see the film first. But I do know that script is ok, and the director is great - He directed “The Creation of The Universe” which is good, because it would suck if it went straight to DVD.
TAXI >>What is the WORD, which you think would reside and reverberate in the design world for the next 10 years?
Prologue Films>>Ideas.
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Interview with Chip Houghton & Peter Frankfurt, Imaginary Forces
 | TAXI >>Hello Chip and Peter. Imaginary Forces is acknowledged as a leading practitioner of experience design. Chip Houghton said this holistic approach “is all about releasing the brand from static representation and setting its story in motion.” What drives experience design then?
Imaginary Forces>>We’ve been involved in experience design since 2001, where we got our first opportunities, and it’s really evolved from both of our understanding of it and also what clients are coming to us for. It’s really a combination of architecture, technology, media, brand and it’s looking at that as a whole and trying to figure out what it is clients need, what are we trying to do with this, and trying to tell a story. And each one of those is completely unique, each one of those has their own goals and objectives. |
One interesting way of thinking about that question is to think about our own history and process of the company. We started doing main title sequences, and if you think about it, movies are the first examples of experience design where you get a whole group of people in a dark room and get them to suspend disbelief, and they are expecting a story so you better tell them a story. Where we’ve gone is say, let's take that scale of story and tell them in a different medium or platform – sometimes where stories are expected, sometimes the story’s a surprise and maybe a delight – that’s how we started. Some of our first projects were programming a football stadium, and during a project with IBM where we were creating something for client briefings which was traditionally very dry and all business, we took the whole expectation of IBM customers from the minute they got into the elevator by using design and architecture because architecture is an extremely valuable tool in story telling – that was a kind of revelation for us.
There are a lot of different ways to look at that question – what drives experience design is just the way people are experiencing messages and stories and brands. We come from the filmmaking title and the marketing of those films. We come from commercial production working with traditional ad agencies and what we have seen is that – oh my god - there’s so many other ways of interacting with the audience so we'd better think out of the box because if we just look at a computer screen or movie screen or television screen, we’re really limiting ourselves in terms of both expressing a brand and telling a story and interacting with those audiences. We were attracted in terms of exploring this idea of combining architecture and the medium of storytelling and idea of scale because a movie screen is big but stadium is bigger, and why just have a screen when you can have an entire building or exterior or interior of a building? The other thing that’s happened is attracting people’s attentions and technology and changing so many of the tools for showing media and delivering stories, is that it could be the inside of a building, or the exterior of the building, it could be a weather balloon that’s showing the image, it could be a giant hologram or a water feature – it’s anything and everything.
It’s a fantastic palette to be able to play with. With the explosion of development you’re seeing now with Sentosa and projects going on in Sentosa, Singapore; what’s going on in Macau and Vegas and Dubai. Truly spectacular, very highly mediated experiences are being received and being built. It’s a great time to be doing this.
TAXI >>Does being an early practitioner of experience design put you in the forefront and therefore, in a prominent position to shape perceptions and experience design itself?
Imaginary Forces>>I think that the whole communication in the design field has moved so quickly, and is so self-reflective, that everyone is always checking out what everybody else is doing. Being one of the earlier people doing what we’re doing obviously got us a lot of attention and clients, but there is just so much interesting work going on globally that I don’t think we have an advantage. We might have a momentary leadership, but then we’ll see something that makes us go “Oh my god, I wish we had done that”. There are so many interesting designers and animators at work today. I think the thing where we really had an advantage with was being able to build a team and vital network of really interesting collaborators – I think that has partly to do with our different geography, just where we are located. Being in LA and part of the movie business where there’s a lot of really interesting visual artists and storytellers, and also having an office in NY which is certainly a central location in the advertising world, and then having very strong relationships with extremely influential and progressive architects who are leading the idea of experience design as much as anyone is.
We are not an early practitioner of experience design – it’s been around forever – what we’re doing that’s different in terms of what we’re offering and how we’re looking at it is that we are in Hollywood, and our roots are from cinema so we’re sort of taking experience design in whatever form may be. Is it a building, is it outside, inside, interior, is it for entertainment or education or exhibit? And we tend to look at it from a cinematic point of view, so the way that we translate this into the solutions we come up with has an element of cinematic spectacle to it. So you’re sort of putting experience design through the IF filter or point of view of how we work with our clients, or the way we may want to help a studio introduce a big film that’s coming out in a year or two from now, or what can we tease out of that mark. Let’s do that also with the way somebody may experience a building in Times Square, or how somebody may experience an exhibit in a museum. It’s that aspect that we think is what’s new to what we’re doing. I think experience design has been around since forever – gladiators in the Colosseum, Catholic Church and all of that – so much involved in creating an experience. Everything from sounds and smells and architecture and content – and this is just our version of that.
TAXI >>I see Imaginary Forces placing a great deal of emphasis on stories. Is storytelling what makes the company tick?
Imaginary Forces>>It’s a process. We’re used to telling stories, that’s how we solve problems. That’s how we entertain and also how we define the kind of form that we do. IF is filled with wonderful designers and what we’ve found is you can have a super fantastic designer but if they don’t have an idea behind that design it all becomes fluff as a title sequence opening or even an experience design project where it’s just a bunch of pretty pictures but no one gives a damn about them. There isn’t a narrative to engage you or pull some emotion or give you some kind of insight or whatever it is so we always sit down in our early design process and just talk about the ideas – and all about what’s the best way of taking this concept and telling it in a way where people say, "Hey that’s great" or "Now I get it", or "Wow, I didn’t think about it that way". We talk about storytelling that’s a big part of our design process or product.
The content needs to be a unifying idea - content could be anything. Being able to understand what the animating idea of something is, and to be able to identify that and give it form. And also, by being relatively fearless in tackling technology issues and integration issues where things that haven’t been done or things that haven’t been combined before are a part of our tool set.
TAXI >>What is the game plan to morph into a multi-disciplinary entertainment and design agency like Imaginary Forces in less than 10 years?
Imaginary Forces>>Our game plan was really to be talented, ambitious and rigorous in the work that we do, and fearless in terms of going after projects that people wouldn’t normally associate with us – so if they thought that we could do motion design, we’d say, "Yeah, of course we could do motion design, but we should also be involved in the architecture". If they say can we do the title sequence, we’ll say, "We’ll do the title sequence but we’ll do the whole ad campaign too". We take multiple components – we don’t need to do it all, but certainly being an interesting collaborator is a major asset for us. We worked with Frank Gehry last year on Sentosa and he was able to talk to us about technology, about previous civilizations, interior experience, integrating all things that we can learn to do and so part of our game plan was to be very activist about trying new things and not screwing them up.
When we were forming IF, we went through some of the basic business plans of what’s our mission and what we’re going to be doing, which we haven’t looked at in 11 years and is sitting in a file somewhere – but we know that if we pull it out, what we do remember writing is "Look, this landscape, this communication entertainment landscape is morphing right in front of us". And this was back in 1996, and so things were really starting to crank up with the whole Internet companies that were popping up every moment and we could sense traditional ad agency structures were going to be different and so we said, "Look, we know we want really good design and want to have best absolute top A clientele out there, and be working with the best people in their professions – let’s figure out what we can do that we’re good at, but can translate into other ways in communicating and entertaining" - and it’s just literally been because we got this opportunity and it opened up doors or opportunities to work on the next project, and it was very difficult to swim up that stream because we had to constantly convince people we could help to come up with the solution even though maybe it wasn’t in our portfolio or something we have done already.
Also, it took some really big clients and a big gamble to go with us on that aspect, but what would happen is if you look at the stuff we’ve done before, they said "Jesus, that's pretty good stuff", and they’ll say, "Okay, now you guys make it happen for this", and that’s how we went from main title sequences and a little of feature marketing and advertising stuff into this much larger scope of services and opportunities. And it’s not "Uh oh, we’re working for Steven Spielberg, don’t screw up", or "Uh oh, we’re working for IBM, don’t screw up", and it’s just going down that road and fortunately we’ve been pretty lucky so far.
TAXI >>Imaginary Forces is also known for its brand invigoration prowess. How would you describe the Imaginary Forces brand?
Imaginary Forces>>We are a curious, innovative, reliable communications partner. We are really good at telling very complicated stories in a very simple way, very good at creating emotions and spectacle, and we’re really good at finding and protecting an idea through all the different forms that represent it.
TAXI >>Imaginary Forces has its finger in many pies — from feature film production to architecture, from corporate branding to entertainment marketing and promotion, from advertising interactive media. How do you grow the company without turning out to be a Jack-of-all trades?
Imaginary Forces>> Well we’re really a Jack of one trade, which is telling a really good story in a lot of different platforms. And also we’ve been able to get really talented people into the company - young, really talented and ambitious people, but many of whom are staff of the company and work there full time, and many of whom have their own things and collaborate with us on a regular basis. There are just so many really fabulous people and now with the web, you can connect globally basically 24 hours a day. We have someone who worked with IF for several years, and now moved back to Taipei, who we still work with relatively seamlessly. One of our designers just moved to Paris, but we still work with him regularly. By the same token we have collaborators from the UN Studio in Amsterdam and in Vienna which we work with on projects together. Again, I think the web and digital tools have made that kind of collaboration kind of transparent.
It is all about talent, and one of the reasons that we are able to work with the same talents for so long is that the company provides a lot of different opportunities for the creatives here – the creative directors, the designers, the producers, to all of the artists that work here, so you’ll see a creative production team working on something for Warner Brothers and the same team would be working on something for Frank Gehry and the developers for a competition and so they really get to experience a lot of different types of creative challenges and that’s what’s been going around here. They’re designed to be able to do everything – you’re not allowed to just do one thing. It’ll be kind of weird, everyone would look at that person and think what’s wrong with him!
TAXI >>Given your expertise, what is the rule to bear in mind in whatever media a designer works in?
Imaginary Forces>> Whatever you’re doing just do it the best you possibly can – effort and high standards count. You have to have the highest standards, and be harder on yourself than the client is. We apply that to basically everything that we do and it’s really a part of our culture – that’s creative, that’s production, that’s ethics, finance and all of those different components. We really are tough on ourselves to make sure we can exceed any expectation and that’s hard to do year in and year out with really top notch clients so Chip always uses all these sports metaphors, like, we’re a basketball team, we’re the national champion or world champion (Peter rolling eyes). These people go constantly from one project to the next and they find it inside them to pull it off for really, really difficult projects or really tough clients and love it and eat it up and go nuts about it, and if you can create an environment, a structure to support that, then that’s where the secret recipe brews. And if you have a little bit of control, the smart thing is to get out of the way and let all these people do what they do really well.
Also, one of the things is at any time we always have several projects going which are experimental and where process is not a consideration, which are interesting and fulfilling some other part of what our bottomline is, either to inspire us, or to feature something, or something that’s really cool to give back to the world. We’ve done a couple of things we’re really proud of and have a really positive effect – we’ve been communicating stuff we do with United Architects, we’re continuing to do stuff with UA and we have that kind of social relevance of one kind or another and we’re in the process of collaborating on an installation with MoMA, which is something we dreamt up ourselves and which MoMA could exhibit, but it’s the kind of thing the art directors, the editors and strategists can really put a lot into and not something anybody hired us to do. It’s something self-generated, and you know, hopefully to inspire people to believe in something but even if it doesn’t, the process in itself is innovating and inspiring, and the reward.
TAXI >>What is the WORD, which you think would reside and reverberate in the design world for the next 10 years?
Imaginary Forces>> Overlap. Things moving to create really interesting synergies and refractions.
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Exclusive Highlight on TAXI Design Network
Interview with Danny Yount, Prologue Films
 | TAXI >>Hello Danny. Your titles reflect elements of the film itself. But how much of the film’s nature do you allow to inspire the creation of the main titles?
Prologue Films>>That depends on how the titles are meant to run with the film. Sometimes they need to be integrated with the footage, other times they can be they’re own “mini-movie”. As far as what inspires them – I always try to read the script and see a piece of the film to get an idea of what would be appropriate. TAXI >>You are a self-taught designer. In today’s world, artists are emerging everywhere from their own ability & trained by their curiosity. Tell me your opinion on this differentiation of designers impacting the industry as a whole. |
Prologue Films>>I was self-taught in that I learned how to use the computer efficiently and make things look like good design rip-offs, but the art of visual communication was developed by learning from mentors in the workplace, which took years to development. The problem with a lot of design today is that our self-enabling computers have made us “digital artists” and “mo-graphers” - drunk on technology and ability but lacking in originality and good storytelling and design problem-solving, which many times is a product of restraint, not technique.
TAXI >>What is the line of thought & principles you adhere to when presented with & embarking on a new project?
Prologue Films>>A. That I am called to be a visual communicator first and an artist second. If I ignore former I do not go to the next round of discussions with the client. If I ignore the latter I have missed an opportunity to make something interesting and memorable.
B. I make sure that the right people are involved. I am very “hands-on” - I make a lot of my own design and animation, but I can only do so much so I get people involved who are passionate and talented – like my good friends DongHo Lee, Alex Hansen, Ilya Abulhanov, Dave Ridner, Eric Keller, Eric Anderson and Dan Brown and Dade Odgren. These are the people I have worked with over the years who have really been in the trenches with me and helped me make good things. I have learned from them and we have encouraged and inspired each other along the way.
TAXI >>You once stated in an interview that “Failure is a great teacher”. I admire that resilience and it certainly is a lot better than whining. In today’s ever changing landscape saturated with designers and their imaginations, I think failure is not an option or concept anymore. There is plenty to learn from – or hell, to copy from – but I think essentially everyone is learning what it means to have their own voice. As a designer who’s been involved since 1992 and one who successfully found his own, tell me your opinion on this booming industry and what it holds for the future.
Prologue Films>>If you are willing to challenge yourself you will eventually fail because you are human. That is how we all learn and stretch ourselves whether we admit that or not. And if you are not failing then you are probably not trying new things. What I love about this field is that it is fueled by innovation. So as long as designers are thinking and trying new things then there will be always be a future for graphic design. But it will die as an industry if it becomes self-absorbed or standardized. It’s really up to us.
TAXI >>No matter how intricate, I always sense a steady calm & elegance exuding from your designs. And this is consistent throughout all your designs from the titles for Kiss Kiss Bang Bang to he Invasion to The Grid. And who could forget the Emmy award-winning Six Feet Under titles? As creative director & creator, what is your personal process of inspiration & creation? How do you relate this vision to your team?
Prologue Films>>I just start with what needs to be communicated and then and try to find a good way to do that. And then I set out to try make something I will not regret or get bored of. I make storyboards and a motion example or edit if time allows. I use the opportunity to experiment and to learn something new and then I invite others to make it as good as we can with as few people as possible. Once it is accepted by the director I discuss the next stages with the team. If I do my job well then it becomes something that generates inspiration and collaboration within the team. People get excited about it and it ends up better than where it started. When that happens it is a very rewarding process.
TAXI >>You’ll be speaking at the upcoming AGIdeas conference in Australia! We’re terribly excited. Also, we’re going to be really bold to ask – what is incorporated in your speech that is different from the rest of the speakers? Everyone has a different opinion & a different style, but inspiration itself is difficult to mold. Please do share with us your take on inspiring the new generation and passing on the wisdom to success.
Prologue Films>>I will be speaking to a large group of very established designers and then to students. To the students I will share with them what has inspired me and what I have learned along the way and show work. The larger group will hear less about myself and more about the work in general. I did not take lessons from Tony Robbins but every now and then I have some things to say that help others gain insight or confirm what they have already learned. For me speaking is an organic process – when I try to follow a script I mess it up. What I try to do instead is show things that will inspire the younger generation as well as remind them that design is design – there are principles that are absolute and constant and I try to remind them of that.
TAXI >>What are the best and worst memories of your being a designer in the industry?
Prologue Films>>Best:
- Getting my first professional design job.
- Being told by a film director I admire that my work is great.
- Directing a shoot at an exotic location.
Worst:
- Working 3 days straight.
- Receiving threats and insults by clients.
- Being told by a film director I admire that my work is terrible.
TAXI >>Prologue has an expansive base of work including film, television and other media like video game main titles, upheld by great vision & passionate progress. As a creative director working with a “body with many parts” (stated on your site), how do you handle the creativity that flows through the company daily?
Prologue Films>>We divide work up in a way that benefits anyone who is inspired to make it good. You can not do that by forcing people who would not be interested. That is not always unavoidable but we do our best to make sure everything is a good fit so that the project gets the care it needs. We also hire the most talented people we can find – from all disciples and from all over the world. With a group like that there is a lot of diversity and a healthy exchange of ideas and perspectives.
TAXI >>What is one thing you feel you could change in the industry right now?
Prologue Films>>It would be pretentious of me to try to guess what that thing would be, but one thing I would like see changed someday is my commute. I think it would be great to have virtual working environments and design communities where the interaction and accountability is the same (with the exception of being able to physically touch someone, of course). For me personally that means that I would be able to control a lot of things I cannot right now – like the distance form my family or office noise pollution. I would be able to process ideas more easily and clearly and have a better balance in life I think. The other thing I would want to change is to see an Oscar category for main titles (how vain of me, right?).
TAXI >>I can’t resist, so I have to ask – if you were designing a title opening for your life, give us the brief on how would it go?
Prologue Films>>I would have to see the film first. But I do know that script is ok, and the director is great - He directed “The Creation of The Universe” which is good, because it would suck if it went straight to DVD.
TAXI >>What is the WORD, which you think would reside and reverberate in the design world for the next 10 years?
Prologue Films>>Ideas.
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