The Mechanics of Oppression

1619 - It’s not the first account of slavery in America, but this date can be seen as a symbolic beginning of the enslavement of African people for profit in America. Enslaved black bodies soon become the economic machine behind American growth and capitalism, both in the South and North.

1877 - The federal government ends reconstruction in 1877, and white people devise a new kind of slavery for African Americans: Jim Crow. White lawmakers and citizens create a culture of oppression for Black Americans that include unjust laws and extrajudicial lynchings. White landowners use sharecropping to squeeze wealth out of Black families by getting them in unpayable debt.

2018 - African Americans have nearly six times the incarceration rate of whites. “Corrections” is an $80 billion industry. “Despite roughly equal usage rates, Blacks are 3.73 times more likely than whites to be arrested for marijuana" - ACLU. White people are making millions off of it on the west coast.

Trickle-Down Economics

"Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone." - John Maynard Keynes

"Behold, the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, are crying out against you, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. You have lived on the earth in luxury and in self-indulgence. You have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter. You have condemned and murdered the righteous person." - James 5:4–5

The Bail Project

"On any given night in America, 450,000 people are in local jails without being convicted of a crime — the vast majority of whom are there solely due to financial hardship." - The Bail Project

This short film by Variable by captures the heart of the work being done at the Bail Project. 

Watch and give: https://bailproject.org

Earth Land Mask/Matte - High Resolution and Free

I couldn't find a high resolution earth land mask/matte online, so I hacked one together. You can have it for free! I'm using it for a 3d earth model in Blender. This tutorial below is great, but if you want to zoom in, you're going to need larger textures. This land matte was hard to find in high resolution. You can use it to mask out reflection on the land.

Download Land Mask: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2YvCi82WCwFWmt6dkJtV2VRM0E/view?usp=sharing

NASA has kindly provided all the other high-res textures you will need.

Blender Needs a Better Curve-to-Mesh Tool

I love Blender. It's free. It's powerful. It's open source. And you can create some truly impressive results.

But, if it is going to be a go-to tool for motion designers, we need some more type and text tools.

One of the main frustrations I have is the way it converts imported SVG curves (and text objects) to meshes. Besides being clunky, the topology is almost un-usable if you plan to do anything interesting with it.

It makes it nearly impossible to then apply any distortions like displace, bevel, etc. See how weird and stretched out stuff is.

Compare Blender (left) to C4D (right)

Does Blender have any plans to remedy this? Please!

Let me know if you have any info on future plans.

Logos Pre-Pub Explainer

Made this short explainer to help people understand how Logos' Pre-Publication system works. 

It was fun combining Blender 3D renders and After Effects together in once piece. About half the books in this piece are just AE Shape Layers, the other half are images sequences rendered from Blender with an orthographic camera.

Scrapbook Bible

We scrapbook ourselves into the Bible.

We cut out everyone we know. We Xacto every institution of our modern day.

And we paste them all into the pages of scripture, into the places we think they best fit.

We might take a friend, rip him out of his modern life, and paste him into the story of the prodigal son. We’ll put his name right next to the character he most resembles. The younger brother.

Or we scissor out whole churches, and place them in the margins, and between the lines of the book of First Corinthians.

We even chainsaw whole countries out of 2017 and drag them back in time. They get glued overtop of the ancient nations of Israel, Egypt, or Babylon.

But, it’s not all bad.

Sometimes our collages are works of art, full of truth and beauty. Scrapbook Bibles of hope, contextualized for our modern world.

But other times, they have been murder notes.

Black Africans were ripped out of their land by White American Christians, and glued next to Bible verse about obeying slave masters.

The slaves were smart though. They learned that they had been pasted into the wrong places in the Bible. So, they ripped themselves out, and taped their whole race to completely different passages of the Bible. To pages that spoke of God’s liberation for the slave, and justice for the oppressed.

The dilemma is this: the powerful often think the weak belong on certain pages of the Bible. And they are willing to kill to keep them there.

But the weak* know a secret.

The whole Bible was written by them and for them. It’s their palette.

The meek will inherit the scissors and the glue.

God knows they’re better at art projects.

Because the most beautiful collage of scripture and human life was wrought by God himself. When he was at his weakest.

Afterward:

Dear America, beware of the narratives you glue yourself to.

*weak - used here only in terms of voice, power, wealth, or social status. 

Cardboard Jesus

I'm building a cardboard Jesus in my mind. 

I'm going through the recycling,

cutting off flaps,

cutting out shapes,

gluing them together. 

I'm building a cardboard Jesus in my mind. 

Trump in my heart

My eyes are open to racism.
I know our country's dark history.

My lips are tuned.
Black Lives Matter. White Privilege. Intersectionality.

But, there’s a little bit of Trump in my heart.

My mind is sharp.
Capitalism can’t fool me. #Chomsky

My ears are good.
I hear the voices of the disadvantaged.

But, there’s a little bit of Trump in my heart.

context: https://vimeo.com/147760743

Two Books That Shattered My Understanding of Racism in 2016

1. The Half Has Never Been Told

I don't want to exaggerate, but this book completely rocked so many of my assumptions about the nature of slavery and racism in America. It develops the point that slavery in America was not some remnant of a pre-modern barbaric society, but rather a "modern" and almost "high-tech" driving force in America's "progress". The dot-com boom of the 1800's. Built by the commodification  and destruction of black bodies in an advanced system of capitalism.

Also,  I found this book's treatment of Christianity surprising. One chapter made me cry at the beauty of many black peoples' faith in the midst of chaos. The other made me livid at the genocide and injustice that the white church in America was part of. 

2. The History of White People 

This book is dynamite, and super relevant. It argues that the white race is a fairly modern construction. The stamp of "white" was built as a barrier of entry, a "passport" into a dominant American society. Originally even German and Irish immigrants were not "white".

Both books brought me to my knees in disgust at my ancestors' cruelty, repentance for my own racism, and sadness for the way race is being used as a weapon today.

Bodymovin Test

Testing out Bodymovin After Effects to SVG animation exporter. This animation is controlled completly by code! So excited to get this working on a real project.

Did I Accidentally Debunk a UFO Document?

Full disclosure: I was just informed by Michael S. Heiser that this same criticism was made here at an earlier date.

I’ve been doing research at work for a film on UFOs/Aliens. This means combing through tons old government documents, some legit, some hoaxes.

One set of documents is know as the Majestic Documents, purportedly leaked to the UFO research community. There’s often much debate over the authenticity of these documents. One such document is the SOM1-01 Majestic Document. 

As a graphic designer, the first time I saw it, I knew something was wrong. I could “feel” the hoax before I knew why.

Why? Because the typefaces are all wrong. In fact, we only need to look at one of the typefaces: Helvetica.

The all-caps title here is Helvetica (released in 1957) 

The SOM1-01 document has a purported publish date of 1954, but to the best of my knowledge, the secondary title font, Helvetica, was not invented until 1957. And it didn’t even break out of European usage until later (except perhaps in some hipster art scenes).

Also, government agencies are usually at least 10 or 20 years behind popular typographic trends, so this alone makes it very unlikely.

Compare the style between SOM1-1 and other authentic 1950’s documents. Very different.

I guess SOM1-01 was created sometime after 1975. The general design vibe feels very late 80s or even 90s. That big SOM1-1 title feels almost computer generated.

Christmas 2016 - Logos

Paper, gold, and jasper. When I started exploring a look for Logos' Christmas 2016 video and messaging efforts I kept coming back to these beautiful raw elements.

It was a tough year for many. The presidential campaigns, racial tension, harsh weather, celebrity deaths. Raw elements felt honest and trustworthy.

My writing friend Tyler and I (among others) wanted our message to be timeless and bold, juxtaposing that ancient hope for a strong king with the wholly unconventional kingdom that we find in Jesus.

It was truly an honor to work on. In the end Ronald Rabideau and I tag-teamed the animation on this piece.
 

Logos 7 Explainer

I recently had the privilege of designing and animating this explainer video for Logos 7.  

Here's a few frames from the storyboard:

A few frames from a very early storyboard:

Executed by the Empire

Jesus was killed by state sanctioned execution, quelled under the nail of the empire of Rome.

What role do we want to play in this story? Are we content to be Rome?

Faster Grain in After Effects

The Grain (Film Grain) effect in After Effects can make your work look awesome, there's just one problem, it takes forever to render or preview. Here's a hacky workaround that works best for mograph art. It freezes the grain, so it doesn't have to render a new version on each frame.

1. Make a new solid. 50% gray.
2. Put your grain effect on it.
3. Posterize time down to 0 fps.
4. Choose mode: overlay

Voila! 

What color is the idea of software?

I was curious what colors were culturally connected to the idea of "software", so I took some screenshots from Google searches and processed them through Photoshop. Enjoy.

Takeaway: If you are working on a logo, and you want it to stand out, consider breaking the trend.

Colors of software

Colors of food

Colors of fear

Colors of Jesus

Bellingham City Flag? Yes!

My co-worker Brad Lockhart has just launched a Kickstarter for Bellingham's new flag. You can pick one up for only $33. Get it here.

Why is a a solid city flag important to Bellingham? Check out this TED talk by Roman Mars.

Eyes of a Scholar Explainer

The goal with this piece was to envision what it would be like to read the Bible through the "eyes of a scholar". I thought this was a perfect project to explore a richer, more imaginative style than we usually use for Logos ads.

Storyboard/Styleframe

I used my storyboarding process as an opportunity to work out the piece's style and tried to figure out how some of my motion design heros make their lighting seem so rich and nuanced. It seems the key is gradients, grain, simulated light, and color grading.

I used all the softwares for this piece. It's a hacked together symphony of Blender, Element 3D and After Effects. 

I've tried to learn Blender about 5 times over the last 10 years, and I'm only now starting to feel comfortable making things in it. It's truly powerful, and truly difficult.

Greek Language Learning App Experiments

I had an awesome opportunity to make some language learning app experiments about a year ago. Here's a few screen recordings of the interaction.