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2009 AIGA MEDAL
Recognized for introducing narrative and nonlinear dimensions
to design for films, changing our visual expectations and
demonstrating the power of design to enhance storytelling.
“Keep it moving,” says the 74-year-old, Cuban-born, Los
Angeles-based designer Pablo Ferro, who cuts a dashing figure with
his wild hair, large-rimmed glasses and trademark red scarf. The
prolific title designer, whose body of work includes the
groundbreaking openers for films as varied as Stanley Kubrick's
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the
Bomb (1964), Hal Ashby's Being There (1979) and Gus Van
Sant's To Die For (1995), is synthesizing the key to his
aesthetic. Ferro's designs captivate through kinetic urgency,
drawing viewers into, around, through and over dynamic, graphic
landscapes that do a lot of work: introducing a film's credits,
setting the stage for the story to come and underlining the fact
that motion pictures are about nothing if not motion. “Everything I
do is always moving,” he says, adding that the movement emerges
organically because he frequently listens to music while he works.
“Music helps me edit,” he says. “It helps me cut—my mind just works
that way. It works in a tempo, and when I cut, it's always with
rhythms.
Those rhythms have accentuated Ferro's work for nearly 50 years.
Ferro, who left Antilla, Cuba, with his family at age 12 and grew
up in New York City, taught himself animation based on his love for
Disney films. He worked as a comic-book artist and animator in the
1950s, formed a production company called Ferro, Mogubgub and
Schwartz in 1961, and then started his own company, Pablo Ferro
Films, in 1964, using the short format of the TV commercial as a
means for practicing a new, powerful form of visual
communication.
In 1963, Ferro was invited by Stanley Kubrick to create the
sequence that would reverberate throughout the industry: the titles
for Dr. Strangelove. Ferro was working on the trailer for
the film when he and Kubrick began talking. ”He asked me a question
about human beings at one point,“ says Ferro, ”and I told him,
'Everything we do is always very sexual.' A B-52 refueling in
midair? Of course! It's sexual.“ Ferro reports that one of the
surprising results of his first title sequence was not merely
international acclaim but the opportunity to work on other
provocative sequences. ”They said if I could make planes sexual, I
could make anything sexual,“ he laughs.
Inspiration for the motion and rhythm that make Ferro's work so
remarkable sometimes came from unlikely sources. In describing the
notorious polo scene in Norman Jewison's The Thomas Crown
Affair (1968), Ferro cites popular styles of design in print as
his model. ”I was very influenced by magazines at that time,“ he
explains. ”I'd look at magazines and see a bunch of pictures on a
page, and I thought, 'That's beautiful. If I could ever get that
into a movie, it would be amazing.' But it's impossible. You have a
few minutes to look at a page, but in a movie you only have a few
seconds to look at something.“ Despite his reservations, Ferro
began experimenting. ”What I did was try to design the images so
that your eye would go in a certain direction the whole time. I
wasn't just making multiple pictures, but leading your eye through
the pictures.“
In The Thomas Crown Affair, the polo sequence splinters
into dozens of rectangular images, each containing fragments of the
story in motion, sometimes falling into a grid resembling the
Eadweard Muybridge motion studies from the turn of the last
century, and at other times showing close-up details of a larger
segment also onscreen. The sequence is visually dynamic—and
stylistically breathtaking in its control and economy—but most of
all, the split screen brilliantly captures the essence of what is
now an everyday vernacular: the ability to view dozens of images
simultaneously and select and organize them, or the visual language
of the database. Long before the existence of Flickr and Final Cut
Pro, Ferro mapped the possibilities of the edited sequence across
the screen in a kinetic, nonlinear way, using a method now commonly
referred to as ”database narrative,“ in which the emphasis falls
not on linear storytelling but on the processes of selection and
combination. Intuitively, Ferro understood data's dynamic
potential.
Perhaps the other chief characteristic of Ferro's work is his
perspicacious understanding of the power of metaphor. His work may
be first and foremost visual and vibrant, but it's also narratively
pertinent. Take his concept for the title sequence for
Secretary (2002)—drawn from titles Ferro designed in the
1970s for an obscure black-and-white video he made called The
Secretary. Steven Shainberg's Secretary opens on a
typewriter ball as it spins frenetically and clacks out letters.
Then there is a pause as we read the names of the actors. This
pattern of diligent activity and repose captures the movie through
the interplay of pleasure and work that the film centers on.
Similarly, in the title sequence for To Die For, the camera
glides in tight on a series of newspaper images, moving so close
that the images devolve into halftone dots as Ferro manipulates the
figural and the abstract, and the fine line between knowing
something and then not knowing it.
Several critics have said that Ferro was one of the first
artists to recognize the significance of typography in crafting
effective title sequences. He used unusual type choices in his
commercials, and in his title sequences, he invariably finds a
means to communicate story, character and themes through
typography. Indeed, Ferro's hand-drawn titles—the tall, gangly
letters drawn with a slightly shaky hand—are instantly
recognizable. These, too, started early in his career, helping give
Dr. Strangelove its continued power. But why hand-drawn
titles for that film? ”When we showed the first titles, Kubrick
said he didn't like them,“ recalls Ferro. ”He didn't know whether
to look at the lettering or at the plane. And I said, 'You have to
do them both at the same time,' but the only way you can do that is
if you make the lettering very big and thin, you know? And there's
a lettering I always did for myself, and I used that to draw the
titles and we did the test with the lettering and the images at the
same time, and he loved it.“
Ferro's career has spanned dramatic changes in visual culture,
filmmaking and technology. Films are now cut at a frenetic pace,
and cameras are more mobile than ever, creating a sense of intense
visual immersion that makes it hard for viewers to look away. The
frames-within-frames aesthetic that made The Thomas Crown
Affair a masterpiece is now common, seen in TV shows such as
24 and in innumerable commercials. Similarly Ferro's notion
of mixing forms—uniting hand-drawn titles with narrative imagery,
or using music as a means to think visually—are all now part of a
convergent culture, as software allows live-action images,
animation, music, drawings, photographs, print-based graphic design
and more to coalesce in the same format, and then function in
synergy. However, Ferro understood the power of this dynamic,
inclusive language as early as the 1960s, when his commercials
mixed wildly divergent materials and used quick cutting and a
moving camera to keep viewers glued to the screen.
Ferro still produces, directs and designs, sometimes working
with his son Allen Ferro, and he also continues to consult with
other directors on tricky scenes and sequences. He has been
recognized widely for his contributions to film and design,
receiving the Chrysler Design Award, the Art Directors Club Hall of
Fame Award and now the AIGA Medal, and he is the subject of a
forthcoming documentary directed by Richard Goldgewicht, which will
chronicle Ferro's remarkable career.
Asked how he retains his edge through several decades, Ferro
laughs and says, ”I never show my tricks. I try not to show how
something was done, to make it seem as if it came naturally or that
it wasn't worked on.“ And, of course, he lives by his other key
motto: ”Keep it moving.“
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