january 21st, 2012: check out my new google tv ads motion project.
sunday, april 11th, 2010 As I mentioned in my last post on the topic, TED 2010 was my second year of involvement in the event. Here's the story behind my first.
In January of 2009 I was given the privilege of contributing to the TED conference by art directing, designing and co-writing a presentation with Jill Tarter, one of the year's three TED prize recipients. If you've seen the movie Contact, you've seen Jodie Foster portray Carl Sagan's loosely-fictionalized version of her. But in both the film and reality, Jill Tarter is an alien hunter.
Like Sigourney Weaver, you ask? Exactly. Exactly like that.
In a nutshell, Tarter is the driving force behind the SETI Institute. SETI stands for the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, which means her day-to-day job is literally about searching for evidence of intelligent life elsewhere in the cosmos. So while you're trying to fix that paper jam in the copier or falling asleep during the staff meeting in the stockroom, she's looking for signals from alien civilizations, dude. It doesn't get much more surreal than that, does it?
In all seriousness, that's what I wanted the audience to think; I wanted the gravity of the subject matter and its ramifications to be inescapable . After immersing myself as much as I could in the source material—which didn't take long since I'm already a huge geek for this kind of thing—I decided that "awe" and "scale" should be the emotional tone of both the visuals and the writing. I wanted this to feel less like a slide show and more like an "experience", as corny as that may sound.
The budget was modest, to put it kindly, but this was such an incredible opportunity that I gladly put in as much off-the-books time as necessary to ensure a worthwhile outcome. For instance, I relied heavily on simple but effective 3D illustration to compensate for the lack of licensed photography.
In addition to being cheaper, the custom approach did justice to the inherently speculative, theoretical nature of SETI's work. Rather than try to shoehorn layers of philosophical nuance into existing visuals, I was able to start from the ground up with purpose-built imagery that fit the intended story exactly.
Of course, as is the case with any live event, things got a little chaotic as the deadline approached. Most notably, it became clear during rehearsals that our content was pushing way beyond the 18 minutes TED strictly allots its speakers—prize winners or not—and numerous last-minute cuts were made. They were all necessary sacrifices to be sure, but I must say I was pretty disappointed to see this particular image go:
I'm still pretty proud of the "A-Ab" joke. Oh well.
Overall, the goal was taking just enough poetic license to make sure the message would strike a memorable chord with the audience without compromising the science. Tarter's a great speaker with plenty of experience, but she's very much a scientist as well. Countering that with a little artistry was the secret to unlocking the inherent excitement of the story.
Working with one of the world's best-known astronomers was awesome enough, but there were a lot of fascinating details along the way as well. For instance, I got to visit SETI's headquarters on numerous occasions, and even stood in Frank Drake'soffice for Christ's sake. He wasn't actually there at the time, but whatever. On a related note, I definitely didn't steal his paperweight.
Everything went great once the show started. The visuals generated a respectable level of buzz among attendees and Jill herself was very well received by the audience. From start to finish, the entire project was like an out-of-body experience.
As designers, we tend to cynically expect that clients will test our patience, compromise our vision and stand in the way of creativity. And nine times out of 10, that's pretty much true. Luckily for me and the TED audience, however, Jill Tarter is one of the exceptions to that rule. She kept an extremely open mind during the entire project and really seemed to enjoy the process of expanding her presentation into something bigger than a "talk".
Then it was right back to the can-you-make-the-logo-bigger? crowd. Sigh.
