An Evolution Of Style Frames

An Interview with John Colette, Professor of Motion Media Design – Savannah College of Art & Design

My first encounter with style frames was working with desktop technology. At the time, around 1988-89, desktop technology was pretty unknown in the post-production world. Everyone that pitched for commercials, and pitched for broadcast work was working on million dollar machines. They hadn’t integrated any desktop technology into their workflow. They used to do photographs from designs they produced. They would have a little board on a piece of foam core. It was 7” x 5” photographic print that was quite low resolution. They would try to pitch that to an agency.

Then, they started using desktop technology and dye sublimation photo printers. They went in with physical 8” x 10” glossy prints, and it just enhanced their ability to pitch. At that point, there was a legacy of having a physical artifact of the style frame, of what you were intending to do with the work. The culture was always to produce physical storyboards, so people would cartoon a storyboard when they were pitching a commercial. In lots of senses, that still happens for filmed imagery. But, with digitally produced imagery, you can prototype a little bit better. Of course, that prototyping has become much more prevalent. These days, it’s all screen-based. You have to think of this as before people had projectors in every boardroom, and before people had the Internet in any meaningful way. Those kinds of technologies were incredibly new. The idea of presenting a high quality physical artifact to someone in the late 80’s was a big advantage. It increased their sense of professionalism and allowed them to charge a lot for a job. They got a lot of work from being able to pitch in a compelling way.

If you were doing a shot on a Quantel Henry (“Effects Editor which became the mainstay of the post production industry across the world in the mid-nineties.”), you would have a shot buffer of about 90 seconds. So, you would ingest a piece of the tape into the hard disks. You would build up assets, which took up frames. You had to be much more judicious about what you worked with and how you worked with it. The design at those stages was pretty fast. The cost was very high to work on things. Ideas were usually pretty easily realized in those conditions. People didn’t have crazy ideas; they were just happy to get something done. Design was sort of an add-on feature.

Around 1993, you got the ability to work with video on desktop computers. What that did was similar to what Photoshop did. I started teaching Photoshop with version 2.0, and at that time, there were probably about 100,000 people around the world who were working with that tool. There are hundreds of millions now. There has been this explosion of digital capability. Over 6-7 years, the later part of the 90’s, there was an opening up to these tools. It gave this wide pool of people access to tools that did the same things that the expensive high-end tools did. So, you had these different kinds of opportunities, and different kinds of experimentation, and different kinds of languages being developed. You could see people starting up small design-based studios and producing things that started to define the culture. Previously, the culture had been defined by the access to the means of production, which was very limited. When it’s owned by capital, and it’s a million dollars to play, $700 an hour to experiment, you don’t get a lot of experimentation. Suddenly you have several million people hanging out at art school experimenting. A scanner was $3,500 in the early 90’s. In a few years, that was a $90 product. When more and more people started accessing those tools, the creativity that was applied to design was applied from so many directions and from so many voices. That’s when it became really prolific. There was an interesting period in the early 2000s where RES Magazine used to have a festival called RESfest, and would produce DVDs. All of the early work coming out of Psyop and Tronic and those studios was visible from those DVDs. You could see what was going on and experiments that people were doing. So, there was an exponential increase in access, participation, but also communication.

The early post-production model saw the integration of digital elements into the workflow as being a functional process. So, if you have a staff compositor, it’s to do a photo-realistic composite. Or, if you have a colorist, it is to be sure the director of photography is happy with how everything looks as they shot it, as it goes in through Telecine (“The equipment used in the process of transferring a motion picture to videotape or converting it into television images”). It’s a manufacturing pipeline largely informed by the fact that cinema itself is a manufacturing pipeline. People have a deadline. It’s very expensive to have cost overruns. Film production is extremely tightly managed.

Once you had this desktop explosion, you had different voices being heard. Ultimately, it’s exciting because if you look at the culture we have now, and the playing field is incredibly level. People can participate in ways that they were shut out from before. There is no excuse anymore. Will it be good? We don’t know. But, the opportunity is here. The scale of post-production was really aggregated around very small opportunities in terms of the number of people they touched, but with big budgets. Now, the budgets are much more distributed, but it supports many, many more people. That is a positive in terms of people who are studying Motion Design or who want to move into the industry.