The Man Who Was't There (2000, Joel Coen), Digital Composite, Brendan Dawes, 2004
The French Connection (1971 William Freidkin), Digital Composite, Brendan Dawes, 2004
Vertigo (1958, Alfred Hitchcock), Digital Print, Brendan Dawes, 2004
Brendan Dawes is an interactive (graphic) designer based in Manchester, England where he works as the Creative Director for an interactive design company called magneticNorth (mN).
Brendan correlates his interest in computers and graphic design to his love of video games as a child and the hours he spent playing them at arcades near his home. On his website, he lists a handful of computers that he owned growing up and their profound functionality for the time. However, Dawes stated that most of the schools back then greatly underestimated the impact computers would have. Unfortunately he did not pursue a career in computing, but graduated school with a GCSE in art. He joined a local freelance photography agency where he mostly shot news stories found in local papers, which he would photograph and try to sell to the regional papers. Occasionally-given the success of the story-he would try to sell them to the national newspapers.
Upon discovering Mac computers and Adobe Photoshop, Dawes became interested in creating websites. He explains that he set out looking for source code on very early versions of websites-before you could even center text. He eventually created his first site about the original Outer Limits TV series. He used this site as a showcase for his abilities and landed a job with a web design company called Subnet. This was an experimental try at making web design a business, which actually took off. Some of the company’s clients were Disney and Fox Kids. After leaving that company, Dawes created several sites; one dedicated to the graphic design legend Saul Bass. The 2nd: a flash application that allowed you to edit together your own version of the Psycho shower scene. Upon seeing Hillman Curtis speak at a Macromedia Convention, Dawes was invited by Curtis to join him in a speaking engagement at Macromedia Web World in Seattle to talk about his sites.
After his Seattle trip, Dawes was then approached by his current employer, magneticNorth.
One of Dawes’ less interactive projects, Cinema Redux, he “explores the idea of distilling a whole film down to one single image.” This series is comprised of 8 pieces, each one of Dawes' favorite films from eight of his most admired filmmakers including Sidney Lumet, Francis Ford Coppola and John Boorman. He explains that each film is processed through a Java program that “samples a movie every second and generates an 8x6 pixel image of the frame at that moment in time. It does this for the entire film, with each row representing one minute of film time.”
John Walters of the Guardian discusses Dawes' work: “Film students, academics and obsessives with time on their hands may use Dawes’ grids to postulate new theories about the language of film.”
Each image allows you to see the editing styles of each director and the difference between films. It’s like viewing the DNA of each film, or perhaps a more direct window into the symbolism or the figurative and literal composition of each film. As I am contemplating ideas for presentation, this would be an interesting path to travel and it makes me wonder what taking a very long sequence of memory and distilling it to one image would say. And, like last week’s artist Martin Wilson, I can relate the general composition of my images to the overall composition of his distilled films; the many parts that make up one larger image.
In 2008 Cinema Redux was featured in the ground breaking exhibition Design and the Elastic Mind at the MoMA.
Cinema Redux
About Dawes
No comments:
Post a Comment