Graphic Journey Blog

A family affair 2

Long-term readers of this blog might remember the short film that my sons made about global warming. Well, l thought that you might like to see this latest offering from the pair. ‘The Day I Died’ is the music video for a new single from rising star Just Jack. It was shot in a single day in North and East London – the house interior used in the opening scenes is my friend’s, Tim and Debbie who have also featured on this blog (he is the painter who lives part of the time in Italy).

Anyway back to this little film.  Apparently Elton John is a big fan of Just Jack and was instrumental in getting actor James Nesbitt to star in film. Even Jack himself has a small part playing one of the paramedics towards the close. It is a rather morbid scenario for the bubbly world of pop but perhaps that is its point of difference and will make this track a hit.

 

For any techies out there the film was shot on super 16mm using an Arriflex 416. Enjoy

Hip hop Graphics

This is the work of Christiana Couceiro, a collagist living and working in Portugal...

I know little about her but started to notice her work many months ago, intrigued by the familiarity of the many elements used in her pieces. At first I thought that the examples I was seeing had been exhumed from a dusty graphic archive buried deep within a cave in Switzerland. Then I spotted a 60s Pelican book cover, or rather three quarters of it, the other quarter being a fused element from unrelated pieces of also familiar 20^th Century graphics.

This got me thinking about the appeal of the work. Was it Couceiro’s juxtaposition of disparate elements or was it the trigger of the original creators that was so seductive (to me at any rate)? And it reinforced my belief that although ideas based graphic design is the bee’s knees, the style of a piece can be equally as seductive. Never was this so clear to me when I was judging at D&AD in the 80s. A handful of works was put to the graphics jury by the then relatively unknown Studio Dunbar. The work was eccentric, baffling, and disparate but above all exciting. Within a few months the ‘Dutch style’ had infected the UK like an outbreak of swine flu. The work was totally style driven and it didn’t matter a hoot because everyone loved it. And that influence continued until the next outbreak of graphic fever, which came in the guise of 8vo, a small dedicated group of typographic anoraks whose first love appeared to be Swiss train timetables and technical literature. Everything they produced looked as if you would need an engineering degree to understand it. Once again it enthused the graphic community, lit a bush fire and imitators sprouted from every nook and cranny.

Eventually UK work settled into a regurgitated 60s Swiss/German style that hasn’t moved much for the last 15 years.  The organic freeing up that I witnessed in the late 60s and early 70s with Push Pin Studios is again being replicated and I sometimes have real flashes of deja vu. That is why I am so taken by Couceiro’s offerings, because rather than imitate a style that has gone before, she simply cannibalises it wholesale with seemingly no concern about copyright or crediting the works’ originators.

 

So we are confronted with cocktails of Tschichold, Brockmann, ULM, Lubalin, Rand and many other leading lights of graphic design of the 40s, 50s and 60s all at once triggering echoes of graphic history for us to unravel.

It is rather akin to the hip hop world of music sampling, appropriating directly to create something new.

Plain English

Here is an example of plain English. A complete narative in 43 words...

Inspired

Bored? Take a stack of these...

Preferably the multi coloured variety...

Place them on the table in front of you,  sit quietly and  think. What could you possible do with them?Well, here is someone who rose to the occasion and took them to a brilliant place. Take a look.

Soft, gentle and low

Michael Caine once said that his idea of God’s voice would be the film director, John Huston - he of the booming, gravely tones. My own choice would be the great Orson Welles...

He had a voice of such sensitivity, warmth, clarity and authority, that it was an unbelievable pleasure to listen to. His control of this beautiful gift was astonishing. He would use phrases like 'musical notes to be drawn out hypnotically' or 'stabbed like a stiletto'. His command of his vocal kit was grounded in theatre and particularly radio. It was the latter where he was able to establish a fantastic intimacy rarely possible in theatre. And it was his voice that sent Americans panicking into the streets with his 1930’s radio production of H G Well’s, ‘World of the Worlds’. Welles understood precisely what the voice was capable of and throughout his career he perfected his instrument and often prostituted it too. Stories are legion about Welles’s interrupted film projects, normally because he would run out of money. In order to bolster the coffers he would take on cameo roles in box office potboilers, endorse products in many commercials or take on voice-overs. There are two hilarious moments from these commercial enterprises and thanks to good old You Tube, we can still witness them. The first is a voice over for Findus Frozen Peas, during the recording of which, Welles looses it and lashes out at all those around him. It is highly embarrassing but very, very funny. Click to hear it. The other is on the set of a Paul Masson wine commercial when it is clear that Welles has had rather too much of the said liquid, with the result that he was only able to utter a series of slurred squeaks.  Click to see and hear. But here he is in one of his finest roles as the amoral Renaissance prince Cesare Borgia, in the 1949 film Prince of Foxe.

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This is a scene about the power of seduction and the seductions of power where he uses his vocal talents to the full. See and hear for yourself here.

Enduring icons

James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Buddy Holly, John Lennon, Kurt Cobain. All are frozen in time. They will never age. They will always be as fresh in our mind as the moment before they departed. The earliest of these was the remarkable young actor James Dean. What made him so special? To understand that, he needs to be put into the context of the style of acting that had been developing in New York in the 1950s. Lee Strasberg formed the Actors Studio and he worked along the principles of the Russian Theatre Director Constantine Stanislavski. It became known as ‘The Method’ and it infected a whole generation of young American actors. Most notably Marlon Brando, who in fact, contrary to popular belief, did not study at the Actors Studio with Strasberg, but at the breakaway theatre school run by Stella Adler – another inspirational acting teacher using the Russian technique. But while we all (well, some of us) witnessed Brando develop into an astonishing actor in his early days, we also had to endure his slow demise, disillusionment with the craft of acting and his ballooning into a vast frame while wasting away his talent.

Not so with James Dean, he didn't even get into his stride. He killed himself in a car crash in 1955 at the age of 24 with only 3 major films under his belt, two of which earned him Oscar nominations.  But for us Dean is left intact on celluloid in those films. Look at any of them and you cannot fail to be taken with his highly naturalistic performances. His eccentric charm. His look...

so alien to those other actors around him at the time. Here are two short moments. The first is from East of Eden The second is a scene from Rebel Without A Cause  Take a look at the ever fresh. Ever beautiful. James Dean.

Electric soup

In 1947 the fiendish Japanese designers at Nissan produced this…

Lovely isn't it? An electric van with a top speed of 22 mph and 

a range of 40 miles.

Had they continued in earnest with their experiments just think what an effect they would have had on our planet.

It looks just the job for Tin Tin and friends