I went to both days of Semi Permanent 2009 in early April but I never got around to blogging about it until now. Forgot my camera on the first day and forgot a pen the second day. So here goes (not that) briefly and a lot of point form.
Timba Smits from Wooden Toy Magazine.
I really liked Timba’s presentation, he was really personable and had a well prepared talk (that wasn’t too slick), he’s inspiring and insane (hand drawn type, doing a magazine that makes no money!). It was funny when he made the sign language lady sign the words: gimp gear! Other stuff he mentioned:
LAST Let’s all Skate together
The Sons of Stanhope
Miso book
Ghost Patrol
PSD files with 25+ layers
2B pencil and turps drawings
Two One
Cat Rabbit
Gary Taxali
Kris Moyes – music video director. First impressions: very shy, cute, geeky guy. He said he didn’t like talking about his work and just liked to show it, which is great if you haven’t paid good money to hear him talk about it! By the end he had warmed up and gave good info on his process, storyboarding, legals, proposals and his influences & experiences.
This is some of the stuff he mentioned as inspiration / influences:
Richard Prince
Peter Saville
Duchamp
Gerry
Steve Reich
Jonathan Zawada
The Japanese director who did Bjork’s Cocoon
Fantasia (the film, not the singer)
Ian Francis – artist. A nice lad from the UK who liked to drink beer on stage. His work is amazing – using textured painterly style with Photoshop. I like seeing pics of his studio (cramped) and work in progress. He had prepared a random selection of things he liked / inspired him:
raw news footage from war zones
jazz age glamour
a desirable Japanese pop star
lastnights party dot com
weird cosplay outfits
Tamara Dean & Dean Sewell – Australian photographers.
Old school photographers with really interesting stories to tell. They were not “cool”, they were underground and grungy. They had amazing grim and personal images to show. I was thinking that if I had applied myself at uni, perhaps I could have done nice work like Tamara’s. Some work was from the early 90s and black and white. The subject matter was often dark, sad, mysterious, moody. Dean’s Aceh series of the aftermath of the tsunami was really intense, the story he told about being there made it even more surreal. They were different, unusual to the other speakers.
Danny Yount – American dude who told Chuck Norris jokes to break the ice. ha ha. he gave a brief family history and went on to show his showreel, which of course was bloody amazing. His reel included titles for 6 Feet Under, Rock n Rolla, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and Iron Man. He currently works at Prologue Films.
Other stuff:
mentor = good
He expressed an appreciation for Australia
Showed a pic of Mac IIsi
He liked to slip nutty pics in between his slides.
Ben Nott from Droga 5
This is my blog and I can say this, I didn’t like the way he looked. I’m sure if I worked with him, he would have been mean to me. He described how he started in the industry, showed lots of examples of his work and spoke about how many awards he’d won blah blah blah. He should be very proud of those awards and I’m sure he worked really, really hard for them, but I just didn’t like him. Maybe it was because he was pure ad man, and I’m totally off it (advertising that is).
Scott Dadich, Creative Director of Wired. This was a very slick and professional talk. It seemed like he had done it before (many times). Sometimes he was quite deadpan, but he was an extremely confident American. His typographic and design work is really great. Very particular about type – he even made kearning pairs! Some other stuff:
Sad that Battlestar Galactica is finished.
Typography.com
2001 Space Odyssey
Jim Gray – Lost
Visiting typefaces (at Wired)
Stephen Hiller – article on album cover art in Wired that I can’t find/
White space!!!!
Daniela Federici - Melbourne born photographer based in New York (as you do).
Daniela works in fashion, advertising, celebrity and editorial photography. Her work was awesome. It was interesting to see her early work, seemed like she was probably only a few years above me when studying photography. If only I had applied myself… (again)
I was familiar with a fair bit of her work, including her Guess stuff with Anna Nicole (she said she was very nice and it’s tragic what happened to her). There was major name dropping (which I loved): Fab 5 Freddy, Russell Simmons, Herb Ritts, Mariah, Toni Braxton, Delta, Mary J Blige etc etc There were some great shots of Debbie Harry that I had never seen before. Told a great horror story about working with Lauren Hill. A hilarious story about Prince on the day he walked into his record company and said he was dead or a slave (or whatever it was) and became symbol. Daniela was confident, gave lots of advice (old school stuff like using red filters to make the sky more contrasty), liked to name drop but still had an Aussie sensibility about her. Even though she has worked with supermodels and celebrities, she didn’t like “dickheads”!
The funniest thing she said was “web situation”.
She even has her own travel show called Nomad. (If I hadn’t started to feel depressed at Semi Permanent yet, this was the time).
Ron English – culture jammer / billboard liberator
Have to admit I didn’t really know who he was, but I knew of his character used in Supersize Me. He had heaps of funny anecdotes about his work. Other stuff he talked about:
Obsessed with Guernica and KISS.
He met Warhol’s “people”, who did the silkscreening.
Weird, trippy Peanuts characters, actually lots of weird, trippy stuff.
Abstract art over old comics
Did the Abe Obama stuff
He was a cool dude.
Vernon Wilbert from Digital Domain. Another super professional, slick presentation. He was a funny guy though and even brought his mother with him to Australia. Showed a reel of awesome VFX work including Benjamin Button, 5th Element, Fight Club, Grinch, iRobot and Stealth.
He mentioned machinima – I had to look that up.
He said he cherishes design.
Showed lots of work in progress for Gears of War campaign (the launch date changed his life, he said) – I kind of zoned out here, not being a gamer and all. He did say he really liked Tears for Fears, which was used in the ad. You can see all this behind the scenes stuff on their site.
There were a few others that I saw but I forgot to bring a pen with me in the morning, I had to go buy one at lunch! Nerd that I am. Hey I paid for a VIP seat with my hard earned cash and I wanted to get my money’s worth. I really enjoyed Semi Permanent this year, especially the part where I could stroll in and take a seat in the first two rows. It’s always inspiring, interesting but depressing. What have I done for me lately?
