Early Influences

Story, story, story… Image, image, image… For far too long I had trouble discerning their differences. Fact of the matter, the two are almost entirely interchangeable. Each requires the other, if not shelters the other, no matter the circumstance. Even upon the ubiquitous printed page, story is not only played out mentally, but it comes with its own screening room, its own image—in our imaginations.

As a commercial film director for most of my career, I’d always separated these two. Branding and marketing forces certainly affected this attitude, less, God forbid, we'd tarnish a product’s image by adjusting how we saw it through story.

Ironically, the more I drew away from commercial filmmaking the more story and image merged. Whew.  

It wasn’t long before I started cross-examining certain artists I admired, not for their thinking but for the stories they were telling between the brushstrokes. The Surrealists were certainly crafty devils. Regardless of the fact we weren’t to focus on it, their imagery contained evocative storytelling from that first dab of paint. The same could be said for most cultural movements: artists have been frontloading narratives into their work since the dawn of time (dare I need mention the cave paintings at Lascaux?).

It finally dawned on me that we humans require story, much like we require sustenance, shelter, or love. It’s simply part of our genetic, if not mental diet. And when story fails to reveal itself, we simply grab a thought-provoking snack by projecting story onto anything in order to kick-start a tale. Thus, basic shapes have the ability to contain basic narratives if we accept them as basic food groups in storytelling (if we’re in the mind to listen (or tell that tall of a tale)).

Only once in my filmmaking career did all these planets align: story, image, branding, marketing… It was for the East coast financial institution, First Union Bank. The campaign was conceived by Hal Rhiney and Partners of San Francisco and was produced by Industrial Light & Magic Commercial Productions, then a division of LucasFilm, Ltd.

As the campaign’s director, designer, and conceptualist, I was given more or less free reign to visualize Hal and his team’s rather dry, didactic, financially laden scripts, his point being—tell a visually arresting story, dammit, before the audience falls asleep!

I think I did but I'll let you be the judge.

So thank you (in no particular order (as this list will never end)): Rene, Max, Salvador, Leonardo, Ridley, Lebbeus, Marcel, Walt, Hayao, everyone from that crowded Bauhaus, Syd, Jack, M.C., George…  

It turns out I was paying attention after all.  – S.