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Teams from New York, Los Angeles, Sydney, Tokyo, Berlin, Paris and London, each made a 60-second movie on a Big Idea. They had one month and access to 70,000 clips. Then we traveled the globe to explore each team's work. We discovered that Big Ideas
come from who you are, and where you are. They connect with people because they have something to say. In the following pages contributors Ben Conrad and Alexei Tylevich of Logan, LA talk about Misunderstanding, Creativity and Thai Elvis...
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| Bangkok movie
Conrad's family were in the military and he grew up overseas in Bangkok, Korea and Japan. Conrad had a unique early take on cinema. "The only video or films that we had were pirated from Hong Kong. So they were all shot in movie theaters with the audience in there!" He ended up in Minnesota largely because that's where his father was from originally. Tylevich is from Belarus in the old Soviet Union. His parents worked in film. "My Mom did everything from interior design, to creating sets, production design and costume design for films. My Dad directed animated films and also some feature films. I grew up around that world. It was a very isolated, Government-sponsored, sort of existence."
Power Rangers
Despite the system, filmmakers still were able to produce interesting work that "fell through the cracks." And because of his parents' work and their professional status, the young Tylevich got to see western films like Coppola's The Conversation. While Western kids were watching Power Rangers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Tylevich was watching masters of Russian cinema like Tarkovsky. "Tarkovsky was one of my favorite directors and I was watching his films when I could barely understand what they were about."
Tylevich walks us around the back of his design studio, a building once owned by hip-hop icons The Beastie Boys. You might have seen the building in their Sabotage video by Spike Jonze. Logan own the downstairs, and MTV jokers Jackass are on the top floor. Inside, their workspace is part-diner and part-urban barn with plastic sheets separating 'offices'. The team have just pulled an all-nighter finishing up some work for VH-1.
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| | | | Digital aesthetic
Logan is four years old, and clients include DKNY, The Gap, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola and Nike. Tylevich and Conrad met at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, where they studied with Scott Makela, a pioneer of the 'digital aesthetic'. Tylevich is a case study in the modern creative, a transient with an ear for the creative buzz. After college he worked for a special effects company doing film animation, then worked in a creative agency to be on the "conceptual side of things," then worked as an art director for a TV station, then freelanced until Logan. They ended up in LA, the ultimate border town, at the edge of East and West. As Tylevich says, "It's on the West Coast so it has a huge Asian influence. Then it has this European influence, British, French and German immigrants; everyone congregates on the West Coast because of the film industry, so it becomes a really strange cluster of influences and ideas. But it's completely manufactured. The community is transient. It's this free-for-all, free-association world." LA's where the mainstream of East and West becomes extreme, where things get mistranslated, and take on new forms. That's how Tylevich and Conrad see themselves and their work, the result of bits of stuff from their past, mistranslated into the present. It's what made their Money Mark video so striking in its mix of the totally new and the weirdly kitsch.
Creative misunderstanding
They swap stories about Western culture's absorption into the Bangkok and Belarus of their childhoods and Tylevich observes, "People would imitate something that's not from there, or they didn't quite understand, but they re-interpreted in a sort of bizarre way. That's what's so amazing about it when the misunderstood becomes the new identity for people." Conrad adds, pouring salsa on his burrito, "We wanted to try and do that with our work. Something's lost in translation and it creates something really new and interesting." Tylevich, finishing his burrito, agrees. "That kind of sums up LA, 'misunderstanding and miscommunication.'"
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| The face of The Big Idea
Their Big Idea film is built around culture's most powerful symbol of communication and understanding - the human face. "The face in advertising and the movies is a trigger for people," argues Conrad. Tylevich adds, "When we first talked about it, it's almost like a parody of a Big Idea. Because the face is such a cliché in every form of visual art, from portraiture to advertising. On that level alone it's a kind of a joke, but then it's re-interpreted in an interesting way." For Conrad, working with over 70,000 clips takes the whole creative process to another level. "Just looking at it together leads you on different trajectories. It takes on its own life. The Big Idea of Identity is morphing and changing as we get deeper into the project. Which connects with our concept of Identity." "It's really weird to have this enormous amount of material that you can use," adds Tylevich. "We tend to generate all of our own material, so it's a great exercise working with this enormous amount of well-produced stuff."
Later that evening Tylevich and Conrad take us to a Thai diner, known for its food and Thai Elvis. But tonight it's Thai Lennon and McCartney. "Love Me Do." Liverpool pop via Bangkok and Los Angeles? It's not something you come across everyday. It probably shouldn't work. It's ambitious. It's wild. It sounds like a Big Idea.
The Big Idea films plus 'The Making of…' documentaries and biographies can be seen at gettyimages.com/film.
Also visit:carlsagan.com,
seti-inst.edu | | | | 
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