Newsletter 05

Los Angeles CA & Ft. Wayne, IN – Director/animators Syd Garon and Paul Griswold, recently co-directed a music video for the band NASA (North America South America). The song, titled Money, features Grammy, Oscar and Golden Globe winning singer/songwriter David Byrne and Chuck D, leader of the rap group Public Enemy. The album is being produced by producer/DJ/composer Sam Spiegel, the brother of Academy Award winning director Spike Jonze.

The music video features artwork by contemporary artist and designer Shepard Fairy, who recently gained national notoriety for his design of the Barack Obama “Hope” campaign poster  (which was recently parodied on the cover of MAD Magazine ). The song and video are both loosely based on the Bible verse “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil” and focuses on the devastation and destruction that can be brought on by unbridled greed and the pursuit of money at all cost.  The video takes Shepard’s iconic artwork and animates it through a combination of 3D animation, 2D animation and digital compositing.  The stunning creative design and the use of cutting-edge motion graphics animation has created a video with incredible visual impact.

Being extremely applicable to the current world financial crisis, it is scheduled to be released as the first single from the NASA album in December, 2008. The music video recently premiered at the Flux Film Festival at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles to very positive reviews.  http://flux.net/syd-sam-shepard-splunny-spank-rock-a-slew-of-others

Syd Garon is a director, animator and motion graphics artist living in Los Angeles, CA. Paul Griswold is a director, 3D animator, and president of Fusion Digital Productions in Ft. Wayne, IN. Garon and Griswold attended the University of Miami film program together in the late 1980′s and have worked together on commercial film productions and animations. Despite being thousands of miles apart, they are able to collaborate over the internet via a piece of beta software that allows each director nearly instantaneous access to updated animation files as they are created.

The NASA music video is part of a feature film project that includes a documentary on the making of the NASA album.  NASA is a collaborative project that includes members such as Kanye West, George Clinton, RZA (Wu-Tang Clan), Method Man, Karen O (Yeah Yeah Yeahs), Tom Waits, David Byrne (Talking Heads), Sean Lennon, Nina Persson (Cardigans), M.I.A. and many more. 

“Money” is tentatively scheduled to be shown at MGFest 09 in Chicago, IL in January;  http://mgfest.com/09/