sepoctpreview2008

Interactive Annual 14

September/October 2008 Sixteen Dollars www.commarts.com

H

z t a h c S d r a w o

Surp

t h g i l e D rise and

by Anne Telford

W

hether he is photographing and interviewing the 100 most important people in boxing to better understand the sport, conducting complicated motion studies, or photographing a dahlia a day from a planting bed built for the project, New York photographer Howard Schatz gives each project his total concentration and energy.

A list of the subjects he has photographed extensively includes athletes, models creating ethereal underwater images, actors, pregnant women, newborns, flowers, dancers contorting their bodies into knots, nudes, redheads...you get the picture. “People often suggest new project ideas to me, but that never works,” Schatz says. “In order for me to work fervently and unceasingly on a project, the passion for the subject and the work must come from deep inside.” His passion has not diminished through two distinctly separate careers, and long residence on both coasts. Surprise and delight: these two emotions reside at the heart of Schatz’s photography, and they are the two words that he uses to describe what he continuously seeks in his work and his life.

Passion took him from a career as a noted retina specialist and clinical professor at the University of California at San Francisco, to a two-decade plus career as an editorial and advertising photographer who has also produced seventeen books.

He began shooting photographs in earnest in 1987 while still a physician. “One of the medical books I authored as a physician had 800 pages and 1,200 photographs and I knew every one of those photographs,” he explains. “I think I have a basic ability to retain and recall images and that’s one reason why photography fits me so well.”

Every Saturday for 50 weekends, he photographed homeless people in San Francisco, and Chronicle Books published the

results in Homeless: Portraits of Americans in Hard Times. His work garnered museum shows and press attention. He grew increasingly interested in photography and the photographic world began to respond more and more to his work; in fall 1995 his wife, Beverly Ornstein, suggested a one-year sabbatical from medicine to do photography full-time in New York.

The positive reception he received there for his fine art work spurred him on to make a permanent move after a few years.

“In photography, in a way it’s a lot about making mistakes— leaving yourself open to things happening,” Schatz says. “In medicine, when taking care of patients, especially those with serious retinal problems, you’ve got to get it right. You have to do it perfectly; your patient risks the loss of an eye not doing it perfectly.

“It’s about knowing everything you can possibly know, participating in every kind of conference, symposium and interchange of knowledge, and reading scientific literature and having journal clubs so that when you have a patient, you feel that although there are other experts and specialists, there’s no one better,” he explains.

“Photography is about being a little nuts. There’s a technical part, we set things up so that everything, the resolution, exposure, the composition, is going to be exact, perfect. And then we have to see where it goes and what happens.”

The sharing of information and work, something regularly done in the medical world, where the goal is to provide the best, most efficacious treatment for a patient is different than in the equally ego-driven world of photography, where sources and techniques are usually kept pretty close to the vest. Schatz set about to change that: In January 1996, he began hosting a group of photographers the third Wednesday of every month, where

Right: “This image of Carlos Delgado was made for our fourteenth book Athlete (HarperCollins Publishers, 2002). By necessity most sports images are made with long lenses. Being interested in the musculoskeletal system of each athlete as it related to function, I photographed with wide lenses from a close distance. At the same time I worked hard to make graphically beautiful and iconic images that spoke of each sport.”

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Interactive Annual 2008

Communication Arts

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interactive annual 14: advertising

Vision Streetwear “A great layering of video and graphics that works perfectly for this brand (and I love the pink paint-drip loader).”

—Jon McVey

Overview: This resurrection of marquee skate brand, Vision Streetwear, brings to life the culture and history of the brand through full-screen, content-rich video and a unique product presentation. The style is suitably urban, the camera angles appropriately unpolished and the copy purposefully minimal. All-in-all, it’s a unique way of showcasing the products, and the culture, that offers immediate recognition for brand loyalists and an immersive experience for newcomers.

• For users with slower connections, a pre-loader dynamically culls cultural data and presents it with every mouse click.

• Development time was a disturbingly short four weeks.

• Background video consists of in-motion product shots of whichever shoe is being viewed.

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Interactive Annual 2008

www.visionstreetwear.com

“This site uses video in a way that feels true and authentic rather than forced and extraneous, and it does a good job of capturing the history, spirit and aesthetic of boarding culture.”

—Toria Emery

Comments by Ian Coyle and David Snyder: How did your relationship with the client affect the

“To say it’s rare for a client to name David Carson as an inspiration is an understatement—we work in an interactive world, and type design is often the last thing on a client’s mind.

However, Vision Streetwear was an iconic brand when Carson pioneered his typographic style with Transworld Skateboarding and Ray Gun, so this site pays tribute to that aesthetic.”

course of the project?

How did time constraints affect your final solution?

“While skating around the office for inspiration, we got the idea to film all of the products, seeding in footage of each shoe in its ‘natural’ (on skateboards, around town) environment. Before we ran

with it, though, we needed to prove that the concept was viable. So on the only dry patch of road outside our office (it had snowed a foot the previous day) we took some test shots, running behind each skater to see how it would work. The footage looked rad, gritty and raw.

The graininess of the shots actually worked, and we went with it.

“Because there was a foot of snow on the ground in Denver, we loaded up a duffel bag with 20 pairs of shoes and headed to Vegas for 48 hours.

We stuck to the alleys and the seedier sides of Vegas, all the while trying to keep things a little less than perfect. The imperfections and the lowbudget, homegrown-style blended well with the aesthetic we were creating. In the end, we created something genuinely original.”

Jeffrey Buice/Ian Coyle, creative directors Aaron Ray/David Snyder, art directors Codin Pangell, programmer Ian Coyle, Flash programmer Matt FaJohn/Bryon Taylor, project managers FL2 (Denver, CO), project design and development Collective Licensing International, client Communication Arts

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interactive annual 14: entertainment

Breaking Bad “Simple and mysterious with a lovely sense of exploration and discovery.”

—Michael Lebowitz

Overview: To build buzz for the premiere of Breaking Bad, a new series on amc from Vince Gilligan, this frantic, non-linear video journey is filled with seemingly random scenes and weird iconic images—from a gas mask and walkie-talkie to a scrambled license plate and a handgun.

Together they give visitors an idea of the erratic pace of the show and decisively define why its title is based on a slang term meaning to let loose or go wild.

• The entire experience was created in eight weeks.

• A large outdoor and tv media buy launched simultaneously and drove traffic to the site.

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Interactive Annual 2008

“A quirky, dark and mysterious experience.”

—Bart Marable

Comments by mono: Is the audience you were targeting a particularly difficult one to reach? “With the short attention span of most tv watchers, we decided to launch only 2.5 weeks before the pilot aired. We really wanted to keep the show top of mind. In that short amount of time, we had over 100,000 site hits and were posted on hundreds of blogs. Most of those bloggers became even more intrigued by the show after experiencing our site, which is exactly what we set out to do.

“We told a story—as random and weird as it was. We also captured the rawness of the series by shooting everything on camera to capture every little scratch and imperfection.

Most importantly, we walked away from traditional methods of creating a trailer or show teaser and embraced a more experimental, more experiential approach. Part interactive trailer, part dream sequence, part moral dilemma, the site was designed to leave the audience with more questions than answers. And it did. And isn’t that what any good television series should do?”

mono, creative direction unit9, Flash programmer mono (Minneapolis, MN)/unit9, project design and development AMC, client Communication Arts

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