9.11.08
Lemur! Check out Mixtape Club's new video for My Morning Jacket's single, Touch Me I'm Going To Scream, Part 2.
The video tells the tale of Japser, an inquisitive primate (named, I can only assume, for the great American Neo-Dadaist painter Jasper Johns) on a quest to find his errant firefly.
Non-believers, it's true: the video was created entirely in After Effects 2.5D, with the exception of one shot. I was responsible for the storyboards, some animation and some artwork.
Video and full credits available here.
Additionally, Mixtape Club and Hornet have created a cool, animated noir spot for Nike/Footlocker, to which I contributed design and storyboards.
7.31.08
My good friend and terrific artist Leah Beeferman has put together A Series of Flight Postcards, published by Projectile Press, featuring the work of some finnnnne artists.
The collection is organized around the theme of the flying machine, real or otherwise. My contribution is called Mike:
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You should treat yourself to a set of these babies, they look really great.
In other news, I spent last semester working on a film called Chest -- it's a visual pun disguised as a sprawling landscape painting, disguised as a film. It is partially animated, and I might never finish it. Vamos a ver. In the meantime, watch an excerpt:
You can read a longer explanation of the film here. You can also look at stills of the individual environments:
11.14.07
Read an article I wrote about digital technology and art over at This Recording.
Also, watch this animation I made last week -- it's called "Boobiebutt."
10.10.07
If you've ever wondered why director Richard Linklater's "animated" movies Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly don't look much like
the cartoons you grew up watching on TV as a kid (or reading in the New Yorker for that matter), it is because they are rotoscoped rather than designed from scratch.
Rotoscoping refers to a process by which every frame of a live-action film (a film with "live" actors, e.g. Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy) is traced, resulting in a sequence of drawings (an animation, by definition). You take frame 1, you put your sheet of tracing paper over it, you trace it. You take frame 2, you put your sheet of tracing paper over it, you trace it, and so on. The tracing is often done digitally to save time, but the idea behind the process is exactly the same. The end result is an "animation" of an already-existing film. It's closer to a photocopy than a cartoon.
Left: Still from Richard Linklater's Waking Life, rotoscoped footage, 2001
Right: Still from Michaela Pavalatova's Repete, drawn animation, 1995
In traditional (aka cel or drawn) animation, the animator literally invents everything; what the characters look like, what their environment consists of, how fast the characters can run, if they can turn into dinosaurs or not, and so on. Unlike the rotoscoper, who is afflicted with the timing, composition and movement of the live-action world he or she is tracing, the animator can choose from a zillion different representational options. Sometimes a stick figure is all you need (and as we all know, there's nothing funny about dropping an anvil on a real dog).
Rotoscoping is easy to identify because no matter how stylized any individual frame of a rotoscoped movie looks, the moving image has a very filmy, heavy-looking quality. There is a gloopy consistency to a rotoscoped image; if you squint, you can see the ghost-film underneath the surface, driving the logic of the illustration. It's very much a shellacked effect, whereas a drawn animation has a hyper-descriptive power that extends beyond the vocabulary of celluloid film or video. Animators often intuitively use "pictographs" (as Scott McCloud calls them), but a rotoscoper must decide to add them to the already existing, visually complex film image. Note the clarity and style of Michaela Pavlatova's husband and wife characters, versus Delpy's terrifying blank stare. Brains!
6.19.07
It's been a long time since the last update. Last month I designed and illustrated a trailer for Day Zero, the animated prequel to the television series 24. Watch the 15 second trailer here -- it contains more violence than most feature-length films.
Pretty soon I'll be working on a painting of St. Mary's Playground, a half-acre asphalt "park" straddling the borders of Red Hook, Gowanus and Carroll Gardens in Brooklyn. The playground was constructed in 1960 when the Parks Department acquired the land from the Deptartment of Transportation in response to a growing number of families in the neighborhood. The Department's intentions were good but the place is ominous as hell, empty and perpetually dark. The red, yellow and green forms of the jungle gym are dwarfed by the gigantic, crisscrossed black pillars of the elevated train bridge fifty feet overhead, which prohibits sunlight from hitting the park directly for most of the day. When light finally does hit the ground, it comes in sideways, creating skewed geometric patterns with bluish, Alaskan shadows. At one end of the park, there are infant swings which look like black, rubbery torture devices, and at the other end there is a sign on the main gate confirming the ban on "adults unaccompanied by children." It might as well say: "Attention weirdest, lonliest people on earth, stumbling through an industrial wasteland looking for a way out of yourselves: Do not stage your final act here, in this desolate childhood memory-turned-nightmare: We know what you're thinking and we're sorry, but this actually is a real playground, and there are supposed to be children running around. Go back to bed."
Oh, and Al Capone got married at (the same) St. Mary's church, a few blocks away. I love this playground! Look for a painting of it soon.
3.27.07
Just finished my first 12" vinyl record cover. It's for Enjoy New York, an upcoming compilation from Premier Cru Music. The actual cover is super-detailed, but I wanted to post a small
version here. I spent way too much time making this.
3.06.07
R.I.P. Jean Baudrillard, hipster demigod. Simulacra and Simulations should explain Williamsburg pretty well.
I ran across a photograph of Le Corbusier's Chapel of Notre Dame du Haut in an architecture textbook the other day.
Le Corbusier was famous for his highly theoretical, organized (if not utilitarian) approach toward construction and planning. Buildings like his Villa Savoye, and the Unité in Paris, are hallmarks of the modern, "international" style Le Corbusier helped create. They are angular, geometric structures, lacking ornament,
plain, cerebral and bare.
Le Corbusier's chapel at Ronchamp is a wonderful departure from its reserved, boxier siblings. The outlines of Ronchamp's forms are double-edged -- that is, the contours of the building seem to belong as much to the negative space overlapping the volume of the structure as to the structure itself. Looking at photographs of the chapel for the first time in four years, I was immediately struck by its resemblance to two of Picasso's bathers, painted in the 1930s, two decades before Ronchamp.
Left: Le Corbusier, Chapel of Notre Dame du Haut, north wall, 1954
Right: Pablo Picasso, Seated Bather, 1930
Le Corbusier may have only been vaguely aware of these particular paintings when he designed Notre Dame du Haut; nevertheless, comparing Ronchamp to Picasso's baigneuses tells us something fundamental about the way we perceive non-regular geometric forms: Anthropomorphism, dormant in rectillinear geometry, becomes our primary mode of assessing scale,
length, foreshortening, weight and tension whenever any organic-looking shape (bend, bulge, unresolved edge, etc.) is present in a structure.
Picasso's forms appear to be women (rather than, say, buildings) because their arms, legs, breasts and buttocks are ascertainable in spite of extreme abstraction. Picasso's (and our) representational weapon is the obviousness of a nipple, however contorted or misplaced.
Ronchamp's shapes, by contrast, never fully resolve into the knees, necks and faces their curves suggest; they remain, true to their nature, architectural. The imaginative genius of Le Corbusier's church comes from the feeling that the great, white, winged bird is merely hiding its head on the other side of the chapel, and that if we just walked around quietly...
Left: Ronchamp, south wall
Right: Picasso, Bather with Beach Ball, 1932
3.02.07
Redesign! My old, rant-style blog has a new, streamlined interface: I want the main page to remain a (mis)representative hotchpotch of
mood swings, but I want you to know that I make serious artwork too. The thumbnails on the right mean B-U-S-I-N-E-S-S. Click on them
to be transported to a tasteful world of animation and picture-viewing.
I'm working on a picture about a disco, or maybe a movie theater. Increasingly I worry that my inner visual monologue is a slideshow of 1970 and 80s New York noir vignettes, warped by pre-natal nostalgia, updated to look like a
shoot-em-up videogame. You: a Times Square crackhead, in search of an angry fix. Your enemy: The mayor's steroid-infused, spiral-eyed NYPD task force. Your charge: mainline a two-story pile of crack cocaine before the feds find and arrest you -- befriend a derelict if necessary, he can
run errands for you and serve as a liason to the mob.
WHAT THE FUCK?! NORTH KOREA AIN'T MAKING THE SMALL LITTLE NUKES, JUST THE BIG ONES?! That's right, folks. We live in a culture of fear, governed by policymakers worried about trinkets like dirty bombs and exploding backpacks. But isn't a relentlessly paranoid culture better than one naively convinced of its own safety? Isn't it? Mommy?
Mommy can't hear you. On a positive note, the basketball courts are warming up, so instead of sitting in my room typing on the computer all day, I'll be getting exercise and learning how to dribble between my legs, which apparently enables a certain move called the "killer crossover." More notes on this as it develops.
Speaking of nostalgia, here's a picture I made the first week of my freshman year of college.
1.26.07
A new painting! It's called (Goodbye, My) Coney Island Baby. I recommend the large version, but here's the small one to catch your eye:
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And a couple of new sketches. More of these to come in the future, possibly in the form of a genealogy/field guide.
12.21.06
Ripping ideas out of my head like tissues, except they're the stringy kind that tear as soon as you blow your nose.
Here's a naked girl on a beach throwing a baseball:
And issue #004 of Deutschekomik: A survey of vaporization techniques.
12.13.06
Tempeh or turtle poop: which to eat?
Let's see... on the one hand, tempeh is chewy, slightly bitter and difficult to digest; on the other hand, turtle poop is chewy, slightly bitter, and... wait a minute!
That's right -- they're indistinguishable. Vegans (and occasionally, with growing trepidation and disgust, I) eat reptilian stool.
Enjoy Deutschekomik Issue #003: A vision after the accident.
12.04.06
Applying to graduate school is fun, just like puking or being naked at school. To take my mind off the application process, which, among other feats of solipsism, calls for a written assessment of my "work's relative place in the history of contemporary art," (to which I want to reply: DOODY!) I've turned to my
delinquent, pseudo-Teutonic bi-weekly comic as a form of protest, albeit a mild one.
Deutschekomik, for those who want to know, is a German comic, written by a non-German (me), about subjects that probably
have nothing to do with Germany or German culture, but which, for stylistic reasons, are unrelentingly labeled as such. The lovable Purina cat food mascot Mistur Whiskers, who is basically a cock with eyeballs and teeth, will probably feature
heavily in future episodes, as my narrative ambitions overtake my tendency to create arty, confusing vignettes. To wit: I have already mapped out an issue in which Mistur Whiskers' owner, the late German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, stumbles into the kitchen just as Mr. Whiskers has defecated in his own food bowl. Violence ensues,
but not before all parties are roundly humiliated. In the meantime, here is Issue #002 - A man turns into a butterfly.
11.30.06
I don't know much about Germans or their culture, but I can't get enough of the seething, proto-sexual world of Deutschekomik, my new favorite Sunday afternoon serial.
Click to view Issue #001 - A traditional German folk tale.
11.17.06
A new drawing! It's in the "storybook" category (#4) until I give it a title.
11.07.06
11.03.06
Who the fuck am I?
I should write a book -- wait, a blog post -- about our generation. Who the fuck are we? Who the fuck knows? Good point. But wait -- we're not Generation X, that's for sure.
Gen-Xers are money-grubbling casualties of a cultural void -- we're sort of like money-nuzzling hamsters in a big hamster cage of cultural awesomeness! Like, for instance, everyone I know is brilliant AND productive. What the fuck!? And yet, the world is doomed -- not in the
classic, everyone-dies-of-polio|rheumatic fever|tuberculosis sense, but in the weird, infinitely tackier science-fiction sense. So maybe that's the trade-off, Generation Y: you're all beautiful, but you perish at the age of 40 in a nuclear holocaust (a beautiful fate, nonetheless)!
Whatever. The point is that I've decided to come unhinged. You heard me. Why bother pretending I'm normal? Who am I trying to impress? No one that isn't going to perish in a nuclear holocaust! So to start things off, check out this unsolicited ad for Purina Cat Food I made a while back -- the idea was to create a character like Joe Camel,
half animal, half drooping, meaty cock. After much deliberation, I came up with the lovable, German cat "Mistur Whiskers" -- he loves Purina so much he drools when he sees it!!!
That's all for now. More vulgarity (as well as nice pictures) to come in the near future.
10.15.06
I'm taking a break from commercial art to teach middle school computing and programming at Saint Ann's, my
grammar/high school. Children are strange -- they won't stop crying, no matter how hard you beat them! But seriously, it's nice to escape the clutches
of corporate whoredom, even for a month. Woops -- I meant "the private sector." Anyway, kids rock.
Watch out Rotterdam, Cape Town and Eskisehir: the Pinback Fortress Video was accepted to Resfest 10, which is awesome.
It upholds my belief that a video with actual emotional content and limited (albeit cool) "eye candy" is better than a video with no character development,
blinding special effects and neurotic, choppy editing (of which there are many). Animators: you must love your little creatures, the way you love your pet squirrel, your wife, or the silly fedora you wear to work.
That said, the Brown-borne Mixtape Club has produced a video for the J-Dilla song "Nothing Like This" that packs a lot of story into a very short
format. I had the pleasure of creating the storyboards, which became lavish environments in the finished product:
Watch the full video large or small.
09.08.06
Can't. . . sleep. These are colored pencil drawings, softened in Photoshop.
And this is a composite of a tiny face I painted, cut and pasted over a scan of Casey's earring.
I'm on a mixed media binge. And I'm addicted to the color orange. And now it's 8am.
09.05.06
Summer's finally over -- thank Jesus. What a bust! Look for a piece I'm working on about the end of this sweltering of seasons (the essay's a bit of an homage to autumn, too, the foliage, people, the foliage!) in the September issue of American Airlines' in-flight magazine, American Way, opposite a kickass recipe for Cajun Chipotle Potato Salad!
In other news, Mexico was great. Max Bean threatened to ruin the trip a couple of times with his taco stand/Dorito fetish, but I kept him off the hard shit until I left.
Here's something I made last night instead of sleeping:
07.18.06
I posted two new 10spots for the rap artist Yung Joc. YJ's name doesn't directly reference the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung (note the different spelling), but in a recent Vibe Magazine interview, YJ admitted that he had "read Jung extensively," and that he was "most definitely a fan of [the psychologist's] teachings, especially the shit about archetypes."
In other news, I'm working on another drawing for the kids' book, which is getting darker and less kid-friendly. I hope you kids like... FALLING BRIDGES! and... A WEIRD GIRL WHO SLEEPS IN A FIELD... STANDING UP!
And now I must go to Mexico. Ayyyye.
06.13.06
I'm not looking forward to moving. But I love Dave McKean.
05.25.06
Hi!
So... this isn't really a blog, it's more of a portfolio website kind of thing. But there was a lot of blank space here before I wrote this text and it seemed kind of empty, so this is some text to fill the big, grey void. But I'm not sure I'll update it that much.
What do I do? I'm a graphic designer. More of an artist. I'm a creative type. Ew. What am I talking about? Who gives a shit?
Okay, I guess in the simplest terms, I'm a human. I want everybody to get along in some vague, if not appallingly unfeasible way. I'm terrified of global warming, demented leadership, I might even leave this country to escape the shit Republicans, but I couldn't stand Waking Life either. So I guess I'm a little standoffish with people. Deep down, though, I'm a lover, not a hater.
I like you. I think we have good conversations. Yeah? Well I mean if you're not busy on Thursday night, maybe check out some of the drawings and videos I made, you might like them. The links are on the right. Yeah, right over there.
Hey, remember when we went to see To Die For and you ate all of those Mike and Ikes and threw up on the back of that guy's neck? I think that was when I fell in love with you. We were laughing so hard, trying to keep quiet — you had all those tiny droplets of sweat hanging off your brow, they looked like marbles. And remember that cool, old green cardigan you got at that street fair in Decatur, and how you got chocolate fudge brownie all over it? And the mural in the back of the ice cream place when we went to go wash it off? The carousel with the drunks surrounding the big, black horse, and you thought one of the guys in the background looked like he was about to take a bite out of the horse? I almost died laughing...
Those were the days. And now you're in Seattle, maybe Portland. Who knows. Maybe you're dead. Sorry if I'm being weird. I'm a little out of it, I think it was the MSG at dinner.
Anyway, I'm outta here. Enjoy the artwork,
Tavet
