Interview with Design Federation

From self taught deviant Artist, to producing posters for some of Australia’s biggest films, Jeremy Saunders lets us inside his mental space. Be warned; Photoshop and LE are mentioned in the same sentence!

(2007)

Archived:

What is your name or handle and where are you located?

Jeremy Saunders, aka Jem, Sydney Australia. www.jeremysaunders.com

Where did you learn your craft?

I’m entirely self-taught. A product of Computer Arts tutorials, me… So how I ended up here and not working 9-5, doing Boris Vajello ripoffs in the evenings for a page on deviantArt is a small miracle. Not that there’s anything wrong with dragons, busty angels in chains and Muscle Marys with longswords, you understand.

What is your artistic medium of choice? Why that medium?

Does photoshop count as a medium? Probably not, but if it does, then that’s mine. I was always too untidy for real graphic design (with rulers and gouache) and not untidy enough to be a proper artist. But I got lent a dodgy copy of Photoshop 4.0 LE one weekend and just fell in love. It’s such a zen experience – there are always different ways to do anything and you can use it for years and stumble across undiscovered features all the time. I only found out about layer masks a couple of years ago, which was like a religious conversion, but without the stupidity. Yet to master the curve tool though (it’s like AGDA – I know it’s there, but no-one has yet given me a compelling reason to use it).

Have you always been focused in this particular area?

No… after years of adventuring through the world of music retail, computer games and recruitment, I bought my first computer in 1999 and after a year I thought I should probably use it for something more constructive than surfing for porn after stumbling in mashed out of my head every Sunday morning. So I learned FrontPage, then Dreamweaver, then Flash… pretty soon I was a better designer than some people who were getting big bucks in dotcom startups (I know because as a recruitment consultant, I was getting them their big bucks). So I thought, fuck this, I’m off. Left the UK, got a job at a dodgy e-commerce place in Sydney doing their websites in exchange for a temporary visa. Then in 2002 a friend who edited Inside Film asked if I had Mac and Quark experience. I had neither but she insisted I take her art director/designer/mac ops job regardless of my protestations. So my first paper-based design job was a 76 page national magazine from scratch in 4 days, with no experience. Half the mag was probably RGB and I didn’t even know what Distiller did. But it looked alright actually. Then I fell in with the wrong crowd and the rest is Australian cinema history (well, it’s a footnote in an appendix somewhere).

Whose work do you relate to most? Who inspires you?

There are so many great film poster designers, but you have to start with Saul Bass – he really understood film and filmmakers and got incredible results. Jan Lenica… any Polish or Czech movie poster design is always worth a good look – they always really go their own way and create surprising and beautiful images. Robert McGinnis’ montage compostions on the James Bond posters are unsurpassed even now. Who else – Paul Rand, Steve Frankfurt… anyone really, it’s all instructive one way or the other.

Inspiration however, doesn’t usually come from looking at movie posters – book jackets and cd covers are much better, dealing as they do with more abstract metaphorical interpretations rather than big actors’ heads. Chip Kidd’s book is gold dust, Peter Saville’s older stuff is really amazing, and anyone reading this who doesn’t own at least one copy of Visceral Pleasures by Vaughan Oliver should be hunted down and brutally violated by the razor sharp, vinegary digitations of the robot design police squad.

Do you enjoy collaboration work?

Oh man, I hate collaboration. No, not really. Well, a little bit. Basically when designing a film poster you have the client, who is the distributor, who’s going to pay you and who in theory has the final say. But you also have the producer, or team of producers, who have shepherded the project from conception, usually for at least 3 or 4 – and sometimes as many as 10 – years, and are very, let’s say parental, about the film. And you have the director, who is always a type-A personality, very creative, who is ALL OVER the project and has their vision for the poster too (actually it’s usually ‘You know the Taxi Driver poster?’…). And invariably all these parties will have wildly differing ideas and agendas. Add into this, I appear when the film is being cut and no-one has any idea if it’s going to work, what the hell it’s actually going to be like, etc etc and you can see why sometimes it can be an EXTREMELY collaborative process. So a large part of the job is finding out what people really want, who is flexible, who will defer to whom, who is the ball buster, and if there’s any way of getting out of the other side of the project within six months.

In terms of working with other designers… I think due to being self-taught I had an inferiority about, say, not knowing the difference between kerning and tracking and what the hell lines per inch or prepress were. But now I’m a bit more secure in my conviction that it’s all actually about talent and not technique, maybe I’ll engage in collaboration a bit more. I’ve worked with other designers in the past but I was ‘the boss’ – and due to unpleasant environmental issues I was, I suspect, a cunt. Sorry Lisa.

How do you think/want other people to respond to your art?

In my case the primary goal is to get people interested in the film. A poster is never going to sell tickets in this day and age, but if I can engage the viewer long enough to get them to consider investigating the film, then I’ve done my job. The key art – whether it’s a physical poster or not – is still the best shorthand introduction to the world of a film that we have. Once they’re in the theater, it’s up to the filmmakers, but it’s my job to attract the right people in there in the first place, and make sure they have the right expectations going in.

Other than that, if it looks alright, you know… job done. I try not to think about about reactions to my work. It’s only moving things around on a screen ’til they look nice – let’s not get carried away.

What motivates/inspires your work?

Sounds obvious but the answer is the films. I try really hard to not have a ‘style’ – you have to respond and adapt and flex to suit the film. The film is always the most important thing. So understanding film and filmmaking, visual metaphor, evocations of mood and distance and time, the lexicon of film I guess, is much more important than any level of design skill. I think that’s why I enjoy the job so much, because it’s a really demanding intellectual exercise – deconstructing 2 hours of images and sound and mood, which is what, 15000 frames or something, and distilling it into a single, reductive, seductive image. That’s the trick, that’s the exciting tickly bit. The design bit is just spewing out facets of that distillation.

How do you measure your level of success/achievement?

In terms of achievement, then getting the client to go with your favourite design is probably the best you can hope for. ‘Does the client like it?’ is the only relevant measure of success you have; I’m not creating art here.

Can you let us in on any trade secrets?

However glamorous it may sound that a famous director is coming around to work with you on their poster, it will not be in any way glamorous trying to get them to leave 17 hours later, not with all that blood coming from your eyes. Always find something nice to say about the film you’ve just seen. Never worry so much about trying to think of something nice to say that you forget to actually watch the film. Never take the food offered to you at film premieres. But always take the drinks.