The Wolfpack Film Group, along with tons of sponsors such as the Texas Motion Picture Alliance, is putting together a huge New Year’s Eve Party to celebrate the Texas Entertainment Industry. Oh, and portions of the proceeeds go to the WPOS Homeless Documentary.
The Karma Lounge in a swanky, downtown spot here in Austin, Texas, and so the goal was to create an equally swanky advertisement to appear in publications such as Insite Magazine.
I looked through a significant number of flyers, everything from raves to parties to things we won’t mention here. Most of them had scantily-clad attractive ladies as the crux of their marketing pitch. I chose to go a different direction.
The client wanted something bold, lush, and rich – which, honestly, keeps bringing me back to RED. I swear, if you didn’t know better, you’d think red was my favorite color. For some reason, maybe because I’ve done red really well in the past, clients seem to want me to keep working with it. This time round, though, I was able to add some pretty strong blue and orange elements that I think give this piece a different look than say the Lionheart or Red Luvs Ya brands.
Similar to Austin Skye Wellness, I was brought into a really strong, pre-existing design done by the team at NuArtisan and asked to just augment and add some of the finishing, more illustrative touches.
In particular, I really love the tiled & sticker elements I added. Fun stuff.
Design for the Lionheart Health Website, still awaiting approval from the client.
Took the design elements from the collateral work and grew from there. I’ll publish the changes when they happen.
A redesign of the Concordia University Admissiona Website done while working with the talented team at NuArtisan:
Kamogawa Horumo – a lot of the films that early in the morning are Japanese, and while there was a time when my ultimate goal in life was to move to Japan and live/work for five years, the culture doesn’t appeal to me as much as it once did. This film, however, spends a lot of time focusing on the Japanese concepts of Oni spirits, training & fighting, and the control of proxy minions. Think Pokemon, or as I kept thinking throughout the film, Miyamoto Shigeru’s classic Pikmin game for the Gamecube. The story revolves around a club at a local Kyoto university and how it changes the lives of the protagonist. Who, in Japanese fashion, is a whiney pussy of man. This should be no surprise to anyone who’s seen Japanese material – as much as I love Evangelion, Shinji’s reluctance and selfish moping grate on your nerves. So is the case with Abe and his best friend. This fil was really slow to get going, with Peter Yoder and I both waiting anxiously for a corner to be turned. luckily, once it does, the movie becomes genuinely adorable and entertaining, regardless of it’s punkass protag. Ultimately, the movie is leaves you satisfied and happy, which is what you want, right?
7 out of 10 Stars/ 1 Sleepy
Anti-Christ – this Willem DeFoe/Lars Van Trier film is stirring up controversy wherever it plays. I will tell you nothing specific about the film other than it surrounds the death of a loved one and a husband trying to help his wife overcome her grief. I love and hate this film simultaneously. The artistry of the opening scene is fantastic, and wholly set the subject matter at hand. However, in a way eerily similar to Richard Kelly’s trainwreck Southland Tales, Van Trier is overtly pretentious when it’s unncessary, robbing the film of the seriousness and precious screen minutes it needs to truly tackle its subject matter. There are genuinely brilliant moments in this fil, characters and dialogue that anyone who has been in a prolonged, dysfunctional relationship will recognize. Not the exact words, but the exact progression of the conversations and the reactions/motivations behind them. This couple manipulates one another, and the film asks you to decide who is th villain (if one exists) and whether or not the course of events was deserved. Alas, you’re not given a picture of these characters outside the grief situation that serves as the inciting incident, so you are left feeling unsatisfied and potentially perturbed. Like the amazing film May, Anti-Christ could be an amazing character study into a particular type of psychosis, however, with the last shot of the film, it seems to be damning an entire group rather than a single soul, and that’s unfortunate.
6 out of 10 stars, huge points deducted for pretension/0 Sleepies
The Men Who Stare at Goats – I had never heard of this secret film, though many others had seen the trailer. Starring Ewan McGregor, George Clooney, Kevin Spacey and Jeff Bridges, the movie is about a reporter who haps into a supposedly true story of the US government funding a secret organization to train soldiers in psychic warfare. The subject matter is handled neither with 100% respect or significant comedic disdain, which seems to be what viewers are disliking the most. McGregor is stunt cast, and while I want spoil what starts out as an interesting joke, the whole schtick gets really old after awhile, maki g you wish another actor had gotten the part. Everyone turns in good performances and everything happens basically like you want it to. The fact that it wasn’t more extreme in it’s presentation or attitude leaves you with a lukewarm feeling, which was ok with me. The version we saw was early, no color corrected, without final sound or music, and with watermarked stock shots still present. So maybe some editing and music magic can add the teeth this movie needs to really grab audiences. I don’t think it’s too late to I fuse a little bit of style into this flick and get audiences more interested.
7 Out of 10 Stars/0 Sleepies
So far the score for Fantastic Fest is one okay day, one good day. I’m talking about the films themselves, not the Festival itself. With the opening of the Highball, this years feet is rocking it as the most fun yet, though I admit to a bit of lamentation for the days of standing in long lines of filmlovers and meeting new people. But now I can actually get into the screenings I want, so that trumps the nostalgia factor.
Here’s something my close friends know about me, but others don’t: I fall asleep in movies. I know I’m a filmmaker myself, but I have a problem that if my mind isn’t actively engaged and stimulated, on come the sleepitimes. In the reviews below, I’ll be rating things in how many sleeepies I had and the how many stars from 1 to 10.
If something gets one sleepy that’s not the kiss of death. Just something to note.
First Squad – Mix Russian historical fiction with Anime mixed with some Nazi’s and live action, documentary style interviews to add verisimilitude. The story circles around a young orphan girl with psychic powers who is the last living member of her paranormal warfare squad (interesting sister piece to The Men Who Stare at Goats I saw on Friday). The film is handled like traditional anime, with crazy hair and characters, demons and ghosts, but tries to keep tethered to the real world. I don’t think the mixing of the two was effective and their goal of keeping the battles realistic and accurate essentially melded together to make a snooze fest. Most everyone that saw it with me said it made them sleepy. I personally fell asleep 4 times, which is pretty damn bad. Ultimately, if you love anime for the sake of anime, you can may enjoy the film, but it definitely wasn’t for me.
5 out of 10 Stars / 4 Sleepies
Gentleman Broncos – Take Wes Anderson and John Waters, mix them together in a blender and filter through uber strict Mormon ethics, and you’ve got the filmmaking style of Jared Hess. Gentleman Broncos is an absolute mess of a film. Never that funny, never that heartfelt, and never, ever believable. Napoleon Dynamite worked because Hess and the cast were able to do the rarest of things in filmmaking: creating genuine, original, quirky characters that you buy. Wes Anderson is the master of this. Royal Tennenbaums does it perfectly. Waters is on the other end of the spectrum – he makes movies so compellingly entertaining that you’re willing to go along for the ride and love each minute. Hess doesn’t do this. Gentleman Broncos has stupid, goofy, surfacely quirky characters with poor motivation in a world that is wholly boring and I consequential.
All this being said, Jermaine Clement’s Chevalier and Sam Rockwell’s Bronco/Brutus sequences are enjoyable, but not worth the price of admission. Wait till a friend buys it on bluray and catch it then. Or on cable. This movie is already so sanitized thatit could probably run on any network and the FCC wouldn’t bat an eyelash.
4 out of 10 stars / 0 Sleepies
Paranormal Activity – Not since the Blair Witch Project has a film been this scary and cringe-worthy. Not because of copius amounts of gore or crazy squirm-enducing torture porn, but for the same reasons Blair Witch worked: the fear of what you can’t see and the inability to get away from your location specific horrors. Handled with one cMera the entire time, in the style of someone goofing around with shooting footageof their own family, Paranormal Activity affords you the ability to truly put yourself in the shoes of the main characters and exist in the world. There are only three actors in the film: the female lead who has been followed by a spirit since the age of 8, and he live-in boyfriend who buys an HD camera to document the noises and odd things that happen to her.
And document it he does. The camera is handheld through most of the film, except in nighttime bedroom time lapse shots on sticks. This creates a perfect device to build dread, because everytime we cut to this shot, you know bad things are about to happen. This is a great film that deserves a full release and not to be remade (as is rumored) with bigger name stars. It works because of the situation and the unknown actors, like a Blair Witch before it, and audiences will respond equally positively. And no one will ever look at powder the same way again!
8 out of 10 Stars / 0 Sleepies
No, Dave, we’re not talking about any sort of sexual proclivity. It’s a new project we’re involved with, and it’s amazing. Fantastic stuff being done here in Austin, but this is all you can see for now….
The name of the project is Sodom: The Prophecy Armageddon, though we’ve discussed simply branding it as Sodom as it’s much more stark.
The first version of the website has been approved and will be launched shortly, at which point, I’ll post more here.
Finished up creating the logo for Firewater Solutions, a project I was brought onto by the team at NuArtisan a home safety company that wanted to have a sharp, modern brand that was bright and vibrant. Something that would instill confidence but not come across as stodgy or old.
I had many ideas and many different ways to handle this logo. Believe it or not, the combination of Fire & Water in a logo is a pretty common thing, so much so that when I looked around at fire logos just to see what others were doing, most of the logos actually had water included in there as well.
Ultimately, there was a central shape and style I loved, but its actual interpretation could be played with. The basic concept was a bowl of water with fire on top, with the bowl of water beginning to show signs of boiling.
The other concepts I had in my head was playing on the Japanese Water panting concept (no.1), a simple drop of water on fire (no.6) and a splash of water surrounding a raging flame (no.7).
Continuing the Lionheart Health Branding Initiate 2009, the client requested 6×4, post card size flyers that could be left at various sponsors around town.
Like with the business cards, the big goals were to showcase the brand, the contact information and the free health camp offer. Been a few months since I’ve done something for print, so I’m pretty damn happy with this.
Continuing work on the Lionheart Health Brand, these business cards were built to be bright, and attention grabbing.
We wanted something that had a classical (1900s) feel combined with a modern edge.
For the client, there were three big things the card needed to accomplish:
- Showcase the company name & brand
- Clearly display name, telephone number and web address
- Work double-duty to advertise their unique feature of letting people experience an entire class for free
Can’t wait to see what they look like printed up!
Lionheart Health is a great company here in Austin that provides Health Camps/Boot Camps for those looking to get in shape. Deric & Eleanor Williams are a friendly, enthusiastic couple who love what they do and are good at it.
When Deric started talking to me about redesigning the logo for Lionheart, we were immediately on the same page. He had done a drawing of two lions, facing each other, roaring, their manes forming a heart. I loved it, had a very classic feel.
And I love designing classic logos that seem like they could have been created anytime in the last 150 years. Something that will work 30 years from now, just like it would have worked 30 years ago.
Deric and I talked about making the two lions look like reliefs or statues. To visualize a stone crest for the company, something carved from marble by a skilled artisan. I’m very happy with the result.
For Bounce-Rite Trampolines, my goal was to make something fun, kid & family friendly, with energy but still seem professional and trustworthy. After all, when you’re talking something that the whole family will be jumping up and down on, you want to know that you can believe in the manufacturer.
I’ll post up the other page designs as they’re finished.
We’re working on a pretty secret, pretty badass project. Not going to go into all the details but Ben and I are doing some concept art for it. Here’s a sample – not colored, obviously.
Recently Red McCombs Media contracted me to do a nice and clean blog redesign for them, based on their current website and the branding I’d created back for them when I was the Creative Manager.
Here’s the result:
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