I notice The advertising industry's Clio Awards are turning 50 this year. Time flies.
I was a Clio Awards judge back in my 20's. At that time The Clio Awards were, shall we say... not uneventful
Nice to see they bounced back. :D
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UPDATE 4/24/2009
In 1994, Duke Magazine did a series of profiles of five Duke alumni working in the Hollywood film industry. It's interesting for me to look at this snapshot of how I saw things then:
On an Autumn morning in my freshman year I walked into the Art Department at Duke University determined to combine Art and Computer Science into a program that would prepare me for a career in the emerging field of Computer Graphics. There I met a professor named Frank Smullin who had a great influence on me from then until his untimely death in 1983, just two short years later.
On October 16, 1989, Bernice Kanner wrote in her regular New York Magazine column, On Madison Avenue, about how Nike and Reebok were duking it out for market share.
The real story, I think, is that for the first time a professional broadcast television commercial was about to be produced solely on consumer level computer hardware and software.
In April 1993 I designed a cover for American Cinematographer magazine. The idea behind the image was to create a metaphor for digital filmmaking by using technology to blur the boundaries between the sound stage and exterior location photography. The cover story it illustrated was one of the first articles to introduce producers, directors and cinematographers to the then new concept of digital postproduction itself.
You might find it interesting to note the use of the term "digital domain" on the cover. That turn of phrase was in everyday use at that time in post production as a way of explaining new movie technology to clients. "Once we get your film into the digital domain..." was a common way to begin a sentence in the industry. When James Cameron (cleverly) named his company Digital Domain later in '93, everyone else by my recollection made a conscious effort to stop using the phrase for fear of giving free advertising to the competition. Now you never hear it except in reference to the actual company.
When this April 1993 issue of American Cinematographer hit the stands, Francis Ford Coppola called me to find out more about the creation of this image.
UPDATE 7/30/05
I feel as though I have just come from a real life version of this stage I envisioned back in 1993.
I attended the Directors Guild of America's DGA DIGITAL DAY 2005 today, a great program which culminated in a wrap party on the new "Smartstage" at Occidental Studios in Hollywood. A high-definition camera on a motion-captured boom arm photographs foreground figures on a 90' x 60' wraparound bluescreen stage. Fast computers generate match-moved 3D backgrounds and composite the two in real time.
Pretty nifty.
UPDATE 8/3/05
Some coverage of the DGA Digital Day event:
http://www.boingboing.net/2005/08/03/auteurs_glimpse_digi.html
Here's something I'm pleased to have been a part of. I computer-generated the egg. (Hey, maybe it's just an egg, but it's an egg on the cover of Newsweek.)
This May 31, 1993 Newsweek cover story is one of the articles that introduced the general public to the concept of the internet itself. They hadn't even settled on a common term for it yet, instead putting it under the general rubric "interactive."
Kind of a cool bit of internet history, don't you think?
Here's a cover I designed and art directed for the August 1993 issue of How Magazine. Concept, design and art direction by Joseph Francis. Producer Jimm Burris. Photography by Dan Wilby. Compositing by Robert Bowen at RGA/Print.
An article by writer Onno de Jong describing the creation of the image can be found here.
My work on a 1992 Kodak television commercial led me to invent the idea of assembling meta images out of mosaics of smaller, often thematically related images - Photo Mosaics.
I saw on boingboing that Benoit Mandelbrot, who coined the term fractal geometry, turns eighty next week.
I was lucky enough to be part of the group at R/Greenberg Associates in New York that helped bring one of Mandelbrot's and Dr. Richard Voss's famous fractal terrains to popular attention by animating a fly-through of it in a 1987 IBM television commercial.
The commercial was popular, and went on to win a number of awards, including a Gold Plaque, Computer Graphics, Chicago International Film Festival; a Gold Award, International Film & TV Festival; a Certificate of Merit, Institutional/Corporate ID, Chicago International Film Festival; and a Gold Award, Computer Graphics, Houston International Film Festival.
Happy Birthday Dr. Mandelbrot.
