Photo Play: Instamatic: Jovinna Chan

Here are a two image variations from one of my photo plays "Instamatic" staring Singapore actress Jovinna Chan. "Instamatic" is the story about twin sisters and their journey into the art world. The sisters are illegal refugees who begin their new American life by creating a home in an old abandoned station wagon. The text of the play (like most of my photo plays) are a list of words which describe the emotion, or action. Words like instant, sincere, contorted, automatic, erotic, attitude, physical, melted, devoted confused etc... are presented without order for the actors to interpret. The images seen here have been taken into photoshop, sometimes Warhol creeps into my work, and I just have to go with it until the desire to do so runs dry.

Book Cover Design: Tronik - Wendy Tronrud

Wendy Tronrud explores the extraordinary folds within the realm of contemporary culture, has provided much insight into experimental text, fractal dialogues, and quantum sexuality in film, politics, and story telling. The covers mockups shown here are explorations meant as possible packaging and visual branding for selected texts.

Pixel Characters

An assortment of international characters created in low res.

Logo System: MTV.com

Every once in a while I get a change to touch a brand that is so massive in it's influence that it absorbs any style one might bring to it, so much so that in the end one is actually designing a label of for an era rather than a label for a product. 

At the time (1999) MTV was moving their online brand (MTV Online) closer into the on air brand, so the "Online" bit was dropped and ".com" was added on, eventually after my time at MTV the MTV.com finally got the official "M" logo and the web site finally came home. 

Here you see the 4 distinct logos, each designed to be read and reproduced at a specific size. I have to thank master designer and artist Steve Robinson for the actual final typography.

Logo: UthTV

Logo design for Uth (as in youth) TV.

Album Cover: Edison Woods - Seven Principles of Leave No Trace

 

The final cover image was created in collaboration with Carla Ganis.

Logo: Realm

Created for a Brooklyn theatre company

200 Solar

200 Solar features characters inspired by a Xerox image I found on the street of Prague, on it a black and white photo of a empty room with bold striped wallpaper. The "200 Solar" characters (above) are what came from that.

The Black Sea Hotel: Mexico City Album Cover Variations/Visual Conversation

"The Black Sea Hotel" existed as a conceptual band derived from as online conversations between members in Bulgaria and the U.S.A. The covers show here are an exploration and part of the conversation. Once photographs were sent to me from Sofia I took them i to PhotoShop adding my raw line work and filters to create a hybrid. 

p.s. the model is Bulgarian superstar Polia Alexandrova!!

Motomechi Nakamura/MTV Games: 2004 "MTV Summer Party Crash-a-thon Game"

It was producer/director David Guinan who introduced me to the original animated works of Motomichi Nakamura. Moto created several cool MTV logo animations for the early MTV Online site, later as seen here Motomichi would be given a larger role in guiding the visual look and feel of MTV's online games. Suejin Yang produced many of MTV.com online tent pole events including the "MTV Summer Party Crash-a-thon Game"  shown above for MTV's Beach House.

MTV Online 1998 Redesign

The MTV Online redesign of 1998 was an attempt to bridge the visual gap between the trail blazing visual style of MTV's television channel and the post Java web 1.5 look of MTV Online (MTV.com). For this project I brought in several brilliant young designers each took part in the creation of this short lived design, including Manabu Inada, David Haring, Kaeshi Chai, Periel Tunaligil, Emmy Iida, Todd Hulin, Thoma Kiki, MTV's first Photo Editor Eufloria and the unforgettable maverick designer Matthew Chun who provided the model which we then dumbed down to fit the crude web tools of the time.

MTV: Fuzzy Nunchucks Vs. The Squirt Patrol 1.0

For The MTV 2000 VMA blow out, I designed a photo based two person fighting game. At the time most games used illustrated characters, I thought it might be time to get actual actors on the screen. Thank Zardoz that wiz-kid Josh Byard produced the game otherwise it would never have been made. At that time Amy V. Cooper was the Photo Editor, it was Amy who introduced me to the work of Ian Tong. We hired to shoot the photographs and live video then got Heavy to figure out how to turn it into a game that could be played on the internet (this was web 1.5). In the end it all worked, and then just like so many great web moments it was gone without a trace. The images shown here are some of the only screens that exist from this historic project.

Poster: Edison Woods: Seven Principles of Leave No Trace

This image is a collaboration featuring drawing, photographs, digital manipulation, text, inspiration, and craft of Carla Gannis, Julia Frodahl, Angela Voulangas and myself. The final work has been printed and folded into the 2003 Edison Woods album "Seven Principals of Leave No Trace" as a limited edition poster. I art directed the project and took the base photo images which I snapped on the frozen shore of the Prospect Park Lake in Brooklyn New York (I stood out in the icy air with Wendy Tronrud pointing my camera at the thick white surface of the water for about an hour). Later Carla would put these images through her own singular process before creating the final composition. For some time I thought that Carla had added birds into the left hand side of the image until one day when I looked through the original snaps discovering that what I saw as birds in the poster was actually leaves suspended in the ice covered lake.

Eboy on MTV.com

Eboy created several siminal 8 bit animated logos, as well as cool web games for the MTV site back in the 1990's when it was called MTV Online. This a was nice feather in my cap because Eboy wasn't yet a international hit--I'm very happy that I got a chance to get them on MTV's web site. Thanks Eboys!

The Amoeba Music Logo Reimagined

I had a fun time creating these 'concept' logos at the music mecca of the universe --"Amoeba Music Hollywood", this set of logos were part of an early brain storming phase for Amoeba's site redesign.

MTV Webeo 2000

The "Webeo", the world's first web based interactive music video was invented by Kim Morgan for MTV.com. I was lucky enough to be the creative director for this series. Kim and I had a great time pairing up film and music video directors, with web designers, interactive visionaries, visual artists, avatars, cartoonists, animators, and a to die for group of A-list music talent including Bjork, Smashing Pumpkins, Busta Rhymes, Moby and others. It was a major victory to co-create such electric moments.