reel-exchange

Ian Douglass is Creative Director/Partner at Salt, a creative design and postproduction boutique located in Culver City, Calif., that has done work for national advertising clients as well as television networks and studios including FOX Sports, G4, CBS/Paramount, NBC Universal, as well as a recent project for Fuel TV highlighting the contemporary art duo, the Clayton brothers. For more on Salt visit their Reel-Exchange profile.

CE: How did you get involved with the Clayton Brothers’ project for, Fuel TV?

ID: First, we've always been huge fans of Fuel TV's signature series. Each piece is basically a chosen artist's work brought to life. We're always looking for artists to bring to Fuel TV for these series. Eric Fulford, Salt Creative Director/Partner, has a CB skateboard on the wall in his office and it's amazing. We took the idea of using the Clayton Brothers artwork to Fuel TV, who loved the idea.

Luckily, The artists are a big part of the signature series spots, and we worked closely with Christian and Rob, two of the nicest artists around. I mean, really humble, talented guys. Having never heard of Salt, we spent a bit of time going over our past work, particularly past projects for Fuel TV (Soul Skate and Evolution). Once they felt that we weren't complete hacks, I think they started to relax and become excited to see what we'd come up with.

CE: What helped formulate the concept of the Signature Series piece and what technology/tools did SALT use to put their art in motion?

ID: More than a few meetings were arranged to discuss what this thing could be. A note here: it's funny how, as a creative, you're always puling about clients robbing your creative process and destroying it. Ironically, when a client like Fuel TV comes along and gives you complete creative freedom, it takes longer than you might expect to lock in on a direction.

We finally zeroed in on the concept that all the characters in the piece are either searching for, finding, or have found their individual version of bliss. Some find bliss in a relationship. Others may find bliss in playing a musical instrument. In this piece, the bird flying around is looking for a skateboard. Can birds skate? Yes, they can.

We started extracting the layers in Photoshop. The files were huge! Not only did we have to cut out every character, tree, object in the works, but we had to create what was never painted to make the characters move. It wasn't a particularly complicated process, but tedious as h-e-double hockey sticks, especially because we were trying to maintain the texture of the original paint and canvas, matching the Clayton Brothers' style of painting. While we were photoshopping, Rob and Christian were back at their studio, painting custom elements, backgrounds, clouds, and trees.

After about three weeks of blissful rotoscoping, we were ready to animate. We had to essentially 'puppet' all the character's eyes, lips, head, and limbs in After Effects pre-comps. Once the characters were set up, we set out to populate the scene, one element at a time. If you are familiar with the Claytons' work, you'll know that's I'm talking about hundreds, if not thousands, of elements.

CE: Was there any collaboration with Daniel Johnson for the music and did you play with audio at all for the piece?

ID: The topic of music came up and Christian threw out Bob Log and Daniel Johnston, among others. Everyone in the room seemed to really vibe on Daniel's style and we agreed it would fit well to the animation style we planned to use; rough and simple.

We weren't able to work directly with Daniel, which is sad, because we really came to appreciate his music. Fuel TV contacted Daniel's agent and worked it out. The tune 'True Love Will Find You in the End', was chosen, not just because of the obvious connection with searching for bliss, but also because of the haunting tones of Daniel's singing.

Unfortunately, we had to take all the beautiful breath out of the song to get it down to 30 seconds, and for that I'd like to extend my apology to Daniel. Please forgive me, Mr. Johnston. For what it's worth, I play your music to everyone I know!