Pablo Ferro Frame by Frame
"Music helps me edit," says the great motion designer Pable Ferro, who will be awarded a special medal by AIGA in September in recognition of his "exceptional contributions to the field of design and visual communication." It's well deserved - the guy is a genius! He goes on to explain that music "works in a tempo, and when I cut, it's with rhythms."
Ferro, who lives here in LA where he continues to design film title sequences and advise other directors, was eerily prescient in his design sensibility. He began working on commercials in the 1960s, where he experimented with the quick cutting and kinetic camerawork that would become his trademark. His first title sequence was for Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove in 1963, which boasts the designer's now completely recognizable skinny, hand-drawn lettering, as well as his deft use of metaphor. What is so striking about Ferro, though, is how clearly he understood the possibilities of multi-frame visual communication.
In Norman Jewison's 1968 film The Thomas Crown Affair, for example, Ferro notoriously shattered the full-screen images showing a fast-paced polo game into dozens of smaller frames, creating a mix of close-ups, wide shots and motion. It's a dazzling sequence, and while Ferro says that he was inspired by magazines and their use of lots of images on a page, I think the sequence is also about the visual language of the database. Rather than just choosing several key shots and arranging them in linear order, the sequence maps the image possibilities across the screen, showing us an array of options and telling the story by weaving a pathway through them. This method is common now everywhere you look, from music videos to TV commercials, from print design to video art. Ferro, working 40 years ago, understood the power and dynamic potential of this image grid. Indeed, yooouuutuuube.com, a terrific tool for turning YouTube videos into video grids, has been spreading around the Web for a few days - why are these moving image grids so compelling? What's so pleasurable about the moving image grid? Anyway, to see a nice version of the polo sequence, try Split Screen...
images: Pablo Ferro self-portrait from fax sent to me (!); still from The Thomas Crown Affair
