TwentyFortyOne Blog

For those of us who have worked with gouache before, that shit is NOT easy to use. I love the style that the artist, Kazuki Takamatsu, used in these pieces! I’m always amazed at the amount of talented people there are in this world.

Speaking candidly, I never really got behind the “The Nightmare Before Christmas” movies, but I absolutely respect Tim Burton and his style.



I wish I lived near a MoMA because this exhibit looks brilliant. To see inside the mind of one of the greatest creative geniuses of our time is an event that rarely comes around. If you go, let me know how it was!

I know this is really short and simple, but 3 seconds in I was staring an awe and continued to the whole way through it. What’s it like to be so talented? …I’ll tell you some day..

WOW, Long time since I’ve blogged! I would usually try and find something to blame it on like being attacked by a super mean griz, or like the netz was down for a few months…. But honestly this is all on me! So from this point forward I’m going to make an oath to blog at least twice a week till christmas. Not saying that I’m not going to throw up some laaaaame-dizzle posts to fill my quota, but I promise (all 7 of my readers) that it won’t be a waste of time to check back.

Ok, enough of the bureaucratic filler. I like to go to Borders on my lunch break and check out industry magz like Wired and Videographer just to keep the creativity flowing. Every now and again I’ll come across those random art mags (usually from the UK) that are about $15 a piece and chalk full of the coolest art you’ll never see in person. I used to have about 16 or so of them in San Francisco and would run through them every time I needed a quick hit of inspirado. Anywho, last week I browsed an issue of Whatever U Want and ended up reading an article on a 23 year old brit named James Sutton. Truth be told I’m not that into his style, but at 23 he’s KILLING right now. Check out the new Steve Aoki video he just directed.

I can’t even begin to think of how long this took to make. Thanks to youtube and digital cameras getting better and cheaper, these kinds of videos have surfaced from all over the world.

One of the most popular style of a cheap (yet time consuming) stop motion videos are the “photo a day” vids. The premise is simple: keep a camera on a tripod (or just hold it out in front of you), and take a photo every day for X amount of years. What intrigues me is that a lot of these people started their photos well before youtube was even invented… Where exactly did they think people were going to see their videos?

It’s been a while since I’ve posted a fellow motion graphic designers work on my blog, so consider this my comeback…



This dude, Max, has some pretty tuned in mo graph skittles. Most of his pieces are pretty short, but still really well done. I love the mix of live action and animation, so it seemed fitting to post this video.

So most of my friends know by now that I’ve been interviewing with a company here in Portland called Immersive Media (they’re the company who invented the Google Street View technology). They’re probably the biggest media company that you’ve never heard of.



During our last meeting they showed me a piece that they did (along with Saatchi and Saatchi) for Armani’s latest jeans campaign, and damn is it a great use of the technology! To all the creative and ad agencies out there, take note. You’ll want it soon.

Footnote: One of the models in the ad is also Miley Cyrus’s boyfriend… See if you can spot him.

Kind of like with the animated shorts post, from time to time I’m going to showcase photographers who catch my eye.

Often times when a new photo style catches on, I buy into it for a while but eventually chalk it up to trend. That however is not the case with HDR photos! Once the tutorials started hitting the the web, a lot of attempts to pull off the style fell flat (including my own). It’s for that specific reason that good HDR photos are even more impressive to me.

Great times were had by all during the good ‘ole days back in the Hood, especially with my great friend Sean Stiegemeier. For an entire summer we’d ride our bikes down the hill to McDonald’s for a quarter pounder value meal, then back up to his house for an afternoon of playing Beavis and Butt-head on his computer. It was during these summers that we both developed individually unique passions for film and photo. Even though we were only in middle school, we still made legitimate attempts at making our own indy films.

Our first pass at motion picture fame was a short called “Tag Ripper-Offers”. The story was simple, our underground mattress tag-ripping ring was being surveilled by the Fed’s and was on the brink of getting clipped.

The second film we tackled was called “Bicycle Bounty Hunters”. A movie that was deeply inspired by our devotion to a little known 80’s movie called RAD. If you can imagine a mixture of RAD and the tv shows Taxi and Dog the Bounty Hunter, you’ve got our film!



Our run of McD’s and indy films was cut short when Sean moved to Park City Utah when we were 14, but we still stayed in touch and promised to eventually work together.

Fast-forwarding to today, we’ve both been successful in our own fields and still keep the collaboration alive by helping each other out with various things that are in the others wheel house. Most recently I’ve helped him with some motion graphic elements, and he’s been super generous me using his photography for my website background (one of them).

All that said, Sean’s an EXTREMELY talented photographer/director of photography with a very fruitful career ahead of him. Check out some of his photography HERE, and keep the inspiration alive!

I’ve really got to hand it to these guys. they made light-sensitive audio that can not only change the volume but the pitch as well. Above that, the audio drives the video screens which act as volume displays! Ridiculous. This is the ultimate fusion of performance and art.

The video is a little long and takes a while to get into the good stuff, but wait it out. It’s worth it!