Continuing the ongoing series of interviews with creative artists working on various aspects of movie and TV productions, it is my pleasure to welcome Howard Cummings. In this interview he talks about his work on “Side Effects”, a mystery thriller directed by Steven Soderbergh featuring Rooney Mara, Jude Law and Catherine Zeta-Jones. In addition, we discuss his other two productions, “Behind the Candelabra” and “Contagion”.
Kirill: Please tell us about yourself and how you started in the field.
Howard: I went to the graduate school at NYU to study scenic design for the theater. Right after graduation I was asked for help to find somebody to work on this movie, and I said that I’ll do it myself. I had a theater job at the time, but when I did it, I knew right away that film was what I wanted to do.
I was the assistant designer on Nine the musical which was turned into a movie a couple of years ago. I’m not that skilled a draftsman, and I wasn’t a very good as an assistant art director. But I was good at organizing everything else, so I kept getting jobs from this one guy, because I would do everything.
When I did my first film project, I didn’t realize that there were prop people and decorators; in the theater you have to do everything, so I did it all. The producers were so shocked, and they decided to hire me for their next project. It was a very hands-on experience.
Kirill: You have so many people with so many different responsibilities in all these departments. What were your first impressions getting into that world?
Howard: It just seemed to fit. I was better as the designer as I found out. It seemed very lucky in the beginning to be working on the “American Playhouse” TV series. It was a literary-based historical drama, and my first experience as a kid fresh out of school was designing these historical pieces. The first was set in 1583 and we had to make everything. Then I did three movies in the 1900s, the Eudora Welty story in 1930s, Lanford Wilson’s play in 1950s – I got a real broad spectrum of design challenges. I didn’t really do the New York Lower East Side street movie until later. I did have that experience, but not until after I did a good amount of research.
My next project is turn of the century for Steven Soderbergh. He was supposed to have retired, but he suddenly decided not to. He’s more interested now in doing long format TV. We’re about to start a pilot and 10 episodes, and it’s about a drug-addled progressive surgeon in New York at the turn of the century. I’m kind of going back to where I’ve started. I have a reputation for gritty reality, but lately I’ve been able to do other projects and I’m really excited about this particular thing. It’s where my roots were.
Kirill: Your career started before the pervasive availability of digital tools that allow augmenting and enhancing physical sets in post production. Looking at the list of your movies, I see “Percy Jackson” as the only production that used these techniques on a large scale. Are you staying away from such productions on purpose?
Howard: No, I didn’t. I sort of didn’t get a reputation for that. I’ve been doing art films, and I got this interview to take over a job. At the time it was the biggest movie ever made in Canada, “The Long Kiss Goodnight” that was budgeted at around $140M back in 1996. We had a fair amount of digital effects in that movie. So that was my first experience coming across the birth of digital enhancing and set extension. There was this guy working out of Venice who taught me a lot about those tools. Back then you did have to build bigger pieces, and rotoscoping was so time-consuming and expensive.
I never got to do sci-fi movies. People tend to want to hire you for the type of jobs you’ve done in the past. You can get pigeonholed. I’ve done a lot of thrillers, but I’m not sure how that happened.
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Strikingly beautiful compositions of simple lines and complex structures highlighted by limited color palettes and bold typography. Welcome to the world of Gianmarco Magnani (or M for short). In this interview he talks about his early influences, finding his own style and working on two large-scale projects, “100 Prints” and “Sixty Watts”.
Kirill: Tell us about yourself and how you started in the field.
M: I studied graphic design but I focused my attention as an illustrator. I love books but I’m not one of people who read a lot. I love everything about design and I love to be involved in projects and art direction. I have always been drawing since I was a child, so I think that in some way I’ve always been in the field.
Kirill: Why did you decide to move from animation and video to illustration?
M: When I was in college I was completely focused on animation and everything related to the screen. Then I started working as an animator for different clients, as well as on some personal projects. At the very beginning everything looks great but then I started to see that developing a great product took a lot of my time, and required to have a team to work with. Then you add up all those things about screen resolution, plugins, or any other technical issue that changes under you every six months. So I decided to think about something more simple technically, something that it won’t change so quickly and also something something that I really would want to do.
I always loved everything about drawing, so I made some explorations being an illustrator and the things went really great.
Kirill: What informs and shapes your taste and style?
M: It was the 80’s. I was around eight years old, and we didn’t have Internet, computers, phones or even 150 channels on the TV. Communication was very limited, but I had an opportunity to be involved with things that came from Japan. It was really hard to come by things like that in those days, and for me they were the first design references. A good friend of mine who traveled from time to time to Japan gave me some VHS tapes with TV shows from Tokyo, a lot of Japanese magazines and some action figures as well. I couldn’t understand anything of what I was seeing, but all those images, icons, packagings, booklets and texts were very attractive to my eye.
I’m really sure I’m going to keep those references always in my work and in my mind. I’m also very influenced and very interested in books about graphic design and identity. And there is a recurrent interest about designs made in Germany in every field, and also some interest on the Scandinavian style.
Kirill: The human figures in your illustrations have deceptively simple yet skillfully accurate outlines. How do you distill the multiple facets of the body language into a single silhouette?
M: I realize that my work is composed with just lines with no shades or depths, so I tried to keep working in that style.
At the beginning I tried to do my work in different styles using shades or grayscale palette, but it didn’t look natural, so I came up with my own simple line style and tried to learn a lot of things. For example, I looked at the composition of vintage comics and manga, how they were composed just with black ink and how they didn’t need anything else besides that. I understood that I have to use just the things the work needs and nothing else. Right now I always try to have that in mind when I start every single project.
Kirill: It is often said that the eyes are the window to the soul, and yet you go to great lengths to hide them or crop them altogether. Why?
M: One of the things I always keep in mind is the hint / insinuation in my work. When I studied photography I learned about the difference between showing a complete scene and just a part of it. I understood that if I have just a part of an idea, the viewer begins to imagine and complete the idea in his mind. On the other hand, if I show a complete idea and totally describe it, the imagination of the viewer simply disappears. So in my work I prefer to have at least one window closed.
Kirill: Your latest works has moved away from using multiple colors, employing pure black with one or two accent colors. Is this a self-imposed constraint to push yourself into exploring and refining your style?
M: When I started my first project called “100 Prints” I decided to start all over again. So I worked for a year trying to have a good balance between my style and all my interests.
I chose the same square format for all my pieces, defined the line style, worked on the technique and kept the color scheme very simple.
I think that in my work the black ink always defines the main structure of the composition. On the other hand, color, in some cases, just says where do you have to see, and in other cases it provides a good balance.
I also think that greatest designs have always been composed just by the simplicity, so I would like to work – or try – to make the things that way.
Kirill: And then, on the other hand, you have these intricately layered complexity of musical instruments and motor vehicles. Is the goal to provide a counter-balance to that perceived simplicity?
M: Yes, maybe is a good contrast and balance between both elements.
Kirill: How do you work with type? Do you design your own fonts, or adopt and adapt existing ones?
M: I love to work with type. Right now I can’t imagine my work without headers or texts around other elements.
Sometimes I create my own, or adapt existing ones. For example, when I have to create a logotype or something next to an icon, almost every Print I use existing typefaces. I also keep in mind that in my work words do not necessary need to be read. For me words also need to be seen. For example, the header on the Print Nº019 doesn’t mean anything, it just looks good.
Kirill: On average, how much time do you spend on a single illustration, and where does that time go?
M: When I make an illustration it depends on the complexity or how much detail it has. It just takes time.
Things change a lot when I have to make a Print because it’s an entire composition between headers, icons, logotypes, color schemes, texts and all the those things around the main character.
In general it can take around a week or two working all day, but in some cases it can take more than a month. There are a lot of unreleased Prints and also an entire Series that I have worked on for months, and for some reason they are still incomplete, and from time to time I try to look at them and identify what they need.
Kirill: How much different the final illustration is from the initial concepts that you’re imagining in your head?
M: They change a lot, but I think it’s a positive feedback because it surprises me and sometimes gives me new ideas.
The problem is (and it happens a lot) when you have a great idea in your mind and you think about all the details for a while and then, when it’s on paper, it loses all that magic that is still in your head and you don’t know what happened. I’m pretty sure I’m not going to have anyone of my Prints complete at the first try, and if I think differently, I’m sure I wouldn’t have any of them.
Kirill: How do you preserve color fidelity for the printed media?
M: I try to use them in the simplest way. I try work using just one or two flat colors with no textures, complex gradients or any other effects.
Kirill: How does it feel to hold a physical print of one of your illustrations?
M: When I have the first copy of a Print, I always spend time to look at it and hang it on the wall. That moment really feels great, but after a few minutes of looking at it I start to think: let’s move this, and this, and this, and also this … but that part of the work and the process is also fantastic.
Kirill: You number all your prints, starting from Nº001. What’s the final goal?
M: I have always been interested in working on huge and long projects.
This project is about creating 100 Prints, divided in 25 Series composed of 4 Prints each. They are all created in the same square format with the same style and are numbered from Nº001 to Nº100, and at the end of the project I would like to publish a book.
I started with this project in 2010, and since then I don’t think about the upcoming Prints or Series. I’m sure that’s one of the reasons this project always keep my mind busy and every new Series is a surprise for me. I think I’m going to finish the last Print around 2016, but sometimes I think that it would be better to call it “200 Prints”.
Kirill: “Sixty Watts” has a prominent place in this series, and a few months ago you’ve launched the companion site. And yet, there is no actual band. What is this experiment about?
M: “100 Prints” is divided into 25 Series. When I started the project I decided to create a theme for each Series. When I thought about creating a Series about music, I started thinking about a rock band, but I didn’t want to make designs for any existing band. So I created a band called “Sixty Watts”. At that moment it was just a Series composed of 4 Prints and nothing more. I needed a band and I needed a name, so I came up with something that had a good phonetic sound and also had a very symmetric number of letters for each word.
I published that Series called “Sixty Watts” and a few weeks later I read a post on some French blog about my work and that specific Print. The post said something like: “it’s a Series about a rock band called Sixty Watts, but don’t try to search for the music because it doesn’t exist”.
So at that moment it made sense for that Series to start a new project. It sounded like an interesting idea, with a great opportunity to design everything about a rock band – the discography, the posters, the album covers, the instruments and all those kinds of things.
I started researching some great rock bands. I also bought a lot of things just to know how to design the packaging, how to compose the tour posters, all the logotypes or icons included in each piece, how to create an album, a single, the Japanese versions, an LP and things like that. It was very exciting and I had a lot of ideas in my head.
I always wanted to be in charge of art direction for a rock band campaign, album or tour, and I never thought that if the opportunity never comes I can invent it. So I decided to create my own rock band.
When I started the process I thought several times how ridiculous such an idea might sound like, but then I started thinking about it as being “different”. That’s why I continued with the project and published it, and I am still working on new illustrations and also on an upcoming new album.
This project makes a lot of sense for me when I think about the moment when someone looks at an album cover for the very first, and without listening to the music what kinds of ideas come to your mind. Your imagination start creating a complete story, and if you want it, it can be endless.
Kirill: What do you do when you run out of ideas and get stuck?
M: I talk to my wife.
Kirill: What’s the best thing about being an illustrator?
M: That I love what I do.
And here I’d like to thank Gianmarco Magnani for this interview. You can find more of his work at his main portfolio, as well as the companion “Sixty Watts” site. All the Prints are available for sale, and you can follow him on Facebook and Twitter.
Light and shadows. Rough angles and streamlined curves. Misleadingly simple color palettes and explosively dynamic body language. Browsing the portfolio of Pascal Blanchet takes you decades back into the roaring era of Art Deco and does not let you go. I am absolutely thrilled to have the privilege to Pascal and ask him a few questions about his art and craft.
Kirill: Tell us about yourself and how you started in the field.
Pascal: I’m a self-taught illustrator. I’m 33, living in Trois-Rivières, a charming old small town right between Montréal and Québec city.
When in my early 20s I moved to Montréal to try finding jobs as an illustrator and I failed. It was a really rough time. I finally tried to send my portfolio to some NYC illustration reps and signed with Jacqueline Dedell agency. The first jobs came really quickly from the San Francisco magazine and Penguin Books. It was a big surprise for me!
Kirill: What drove you to be a freelancer?
Pascal: I always had a serious problem with authority. School and student jobs were a nightmare (for both the bosses and I)
so I guess it was only natural for me to end up as a freelancer.
Kirill: What informs and shapes your taste and style?
Pascal: My first contact with illustration was when I was a kid with the old 78rpm records sleeves at my grandparents house. It makes a huge impression on me.
I learned many many years later that they were made by guys like Jim Flora and Alex Steinwess and many others… I also remember having a huge crush for handlettered windowshop ads. It seems I loved art deco posters and streamline style illustrations long before knowing what those styles were. I’m still trying to find and explanation about my love for the 30s and 40s. All I know is that even when I was around 5 or 6 years old it was there.
Kirill: How has your style evolved over the years? Are you comfortable with it, are you pushing it in new directions, and do you want people to recognize your new work as uniquely yours?
Pascal: I like to think it changed a lot over the years. Looking at my first graphic novel and my last one makes me think that I’m (I hope) not too squeezed in my own “style”. It’s also really important to me to look for something else, something new (to me). I never tried to make something I could call MY style, I guess it just comes out that way. I am mostly afraid to repeat the same thing again and again.
Kirill: You cite music as your main inspiration, and some of your graphic novels incorporate artists and music instruments. How do you convey this dynamic experience in a static medium?
Pascal: I think music has shapes, colors, shadows just like a drawing. To me when I’m working on a graphic novel it’s pretty hard to know where music stops and drawing starts. Most of the time music comes first and often even gives me the subject of the story or the characters.
To me there’s no difference between music and visual arts. A jazz musician has to take a standard and recreate it in his own personal way – just the same as an illustrator. Usually the themes aren’t new at all but we have to make it our own.
Kirill: What drives you to publish graphic novels? How does it feel to hold a printed book of your own?
Pascal: I think it was the thrill to tell the story behind a single image in a more complete way. Most of the time in illustration you have to tell something in a single image and sometimes it’s a bit frustrating.
When you finally hold your book in your hands, it’s months after you finished it, so you kind of look at it with stranger eyes. The feeling you had when you were doing it is already gone and nothing much left but: This page is not good, that face looks ugly, bad shadows here…
Kirill: How do you preserve color fidelity when the final product is targeting print media, such as magazines or books?
Pascal: Pantone colors number. But I’m not that much a freak, since all the colors will change but the balance between them will stay the same. So it’s ok even if they are not exactly what I had in mind.
Kirill: As you start working on a new project, is it pen and paper first, or all-digital?
Pascal: It really depends, I do not have any kind of work routine except for music. Sometimes i make a digital sketch and the final on paper, sometimes it’s the other way.
Kirill: What’s the weirdest client feedback you ever received, if you don’t mind sharing it?
Pascal: “Can you make it more à la Pascal Blanchet”
Kirill: How do you work with type? Do you design your own fonts, or adopt and adapt existing ones?
Pascal: Most of the time I make my type. To me it seems impossible to make a poster and have a graphic designer put fonts on it. It needs to be an integral part of the illustration.
Kirill: Some of your illustrations employ high angles, claustrophobic environments, long shadows and stark silhouettes. Do I detect a fellow film noir fan?
Pascal: Totally! But the origins of the high angles and dramatic views came from my passion for architecture. I discovered film noir long after I started doing exaggerated perspectives. My father was working as a technical draftsman and I learned it at a really young age. Also, I am really fascinated with the relation between human being and architecture – how can the latter magnify or oppress the former. I guess my love for art deco also adds to the dramatic side.
Kirill: What do you think when you look at your own work from a few years ago?
Pascal: Bad work, lousy illustration, need to draw something better NOW.
Kirill: How important is it to invest time in personal projects?
Pascal: I think it’s absolutely necessary to keep myself “creative” and incorporate new techniques and make experimentations. Graphic novels are also the best portfolios you can make, my personal projects gave me most of the jobs I’ve had.
Kirill: What do you do when you run out of ideas and get stuck?
Pascal: When i have enough time in front of me I just sit and think. Drawing just makes me sink even more in the bad concepts way. When in a hurry (most of the time). I like to discuss it with the art director. Sometimes it gives a sudden new turn to the job and helps a lot.
Kirill: What’s the best thing about being an illustrator?
Pascal: Drawing and challenges.
And here I’d like to thank Pascal Blanchet for this great interview. You can find him online at his portfolio and blog.
A concept artist. An illustrator. A designer. Meet Ash Thorp. In this conversation he talks about his concept work on “X-Men”, “Thor” and “Prometheus”, the user interface work he did for “Total Recall”, coming up with creative concepts and bringing his ideas to life, his thoughts on where the human-computer interaction is going and the evolving landscape of making indie sci-fi movies.
Kirill: Tell us a little bit about yourself and your work so far.
Ash: My name’s Ash Thorp and I am a designer, an illustrator, art director, creative director. I do a lot of stuff for film, multimedia and video games. I’ve been freelancing from my home studio for almost a year now, and I’ve been in the film industry for about three years. I’ve been drawing since I was a little kid. I picked design in college and got two degrees, and after that I immersed myself into the furthering my education via the internet, which lead to me discovering my own voice.
Kirill: Was it your intended goal to get to work on movies?
Ash: I grew up on a really healthy dose of Saturday morning cartoons and anime and film, and I feel that film is a great medium of storytelling. It was always a big goal of mine to do something in film on way or another. It was always in the back of my head that I wanted to do it, and even though I didn’t know how I would do it, I figured out I’d make it happen.
I was working at a design firm down in San Diego doing graphics for action sports. It was fun, but I felt that I wanted to do something greater for myself, on a higher level, for more mass appeal if you will. I decided I wanted to design for film, and I had to figure out the niche I wanted to be in. I started following a few companies doing motion graphics. I suppose I was OK at design at the time – nowhere near where I am now, and there’s always place to grow anyways – and I saw that it was the niche for me. So I gave myself a time limit of three months to build a portfolio. Every time my wife and my daughter would go to bed around 11PM, I’d work until about 4AM on just building the portfolio, making a bunch of projects, which lead to creating the web site with much material.
I put this portfolio together, and I sent it out to around 50 studios. I got contacted back by only one of them directly, and it was Prologue, I was extremely surprised because they were my favorite company. I went there to interview, and they offered me the position of a junior designer. There was a little bit of negotiating, and a lot of talking with my wife. We live in San Diego and Prologue’s office is in Marina Del Rey up in LA. It’s about 2.5-hour drive, so I had to figure out a system to make it work, commuting every day for a whole year, building my skills and getting better at it. It was pretty crazy, commuting six to seven hours every day to work.
Prologue works on tons of films, and there was a lot of opportunity to grow. The artists and creatives there are just amazing, and it was really great to understand what it takes to do design at that level. It was like bootcamp. It was the hardest thing I ever had to do in my life – the endurance of the whole year, not being able to see my family and friends that much, being completely exhausted and drained, working really hard. Prologue is a very intense environment, great for building yourself but really taxing, with extremely rigid timelines. You gotta do a lot of productions and a lot of work. It was good, and that’s how it all worked out. I left after a year, helped out a friend for about six months, and then started working on my own things from my home as a freelance artist for hire.
Kirill: Were you surprised during that first year, working on real-life productions across multiple departments?
Ash: I learned something new every day, a new surprise every day. You know, when you learn a magic trick, it takes the magic out of it, but it’s still really interesting. I feel that the deeper I go into film and understand it, the further I go from the original thing that I loved about it – which is the innocence of being a fan, now that I understand how the things are made.
Kirill: What were the specific productions you worked on at Prologue, and what was your role?
Ash: Some of the movie projects I worked on there were X-Men First class, Thor, then Walking Dead which became concept pitches to the director. Design houses like Prologue compete in this over saturated market where the client requests to see the design vision for a certain production – usually for free, which is pretty crazy. Those were my original concepts and ideas for things that I worked on with a group of people. Each project would change or shift depending on the notes and feedback from the clients and things would move along from then on taking on a life of its own.
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