Jacques: The Sports Issue Trailer, ‘Squash’ from Jacques Magazine on Vimeo.

JACQUES: The Sports Issue, Trailer 2. from Jacques Magazine on Vimeo.

Nexus Interactive Arts

Sup! check this video out on social media & creativity, features Joseph-Gordon Levitt (500 Days Summer),Chase Jarivs, Levar Burton(Star Trek, Roots), and Marcin Teodoru (30day feature film challenge)

I found this video through illustrator Frank Chimero’s excellent blog and listened to it while working today. It’s a speech that Ed Catmull, president of Walt Disney Animation Studios and Pixar Animation Studios, gave at the Stanford School of Business in 2007 about the hard parts of business and a few important lessons that’s he’s learned. It’s a bit long, but well worth listening to.

The six important points he makes (paraphrased here) are:
1. Review material every day. Constantly review work-in-progress to reduce the stigma of “unfinished” or “imperfect” work
2. It must be safe to tell the truth.
3. Communication between members of the organization shouldn’t mirror the organizational structure / hierarchy. Open door policy means open door.
4. People functioning well together is more important than the thing or idea they’re working on.
5. Don’t let success mask problems (deep assesment)
6. Once an important idea can be expressed in a concise statement, one can just use the statement and NOT have to change their behavior.

Another interesting point he makes towards the end of the talk is:

“Every product that we’re making has got to be original. Which implies that we can never repeat ourselves. To me, this is an important thing because many people in Hollywood don’t actually understand that. If something is successful – if you’ve got Star Wars or Shrek or whatever, then it’s basically, “Let’s do that again.” Well we’ll try to make it a little bit different. But we’ll do the same thing again.
But you can’t think that way, with any products. Everything is new and original. And therefore our way of dealing with and solving the problems has got to be an original. So the secret is we have to keep on digging deeper and deeper and knowing that we’re always missing something that’s important.”

This is a great thought to use in thinking about Motion Graphic Design and Animation as well, when our own clients demand original thinking and solutions to their problems. It’s not enough to rely on design ideas that are based on template and remakes or to try to emulate others’ success. True innovation happens when the right people are given the right tools and asked to create things that are truly unique. And it’s what we should all be striving for.

Here’s a cool new magazine called 160grams, Style, Art, Fashion and Music

Nicely designed too!

160grams

Here’s an interesting art project showing polaroids of random strangers with the one thing that they would like to do before they die.

Its kind of similar to the idea we had for master grad show with “Design is…”

beforeidieiwantto.org

Here’s an example of a zine I thought we could look at starting, but throwing in some design, studio interviews, culture, style, and what ever else would be good.

This has got mainly fashion or just photography but you get the idea, probably get it printed too, small budget.

SOKOzine