"I was a cheerleader in school, but I also made the posters that the football players would run through," says designer Karin Fong, a SoCal native, one of the founding members of the design firm Imaginary Forces and the creator of dozens of excellent film title sequences and ads. Fong, who will join four other designers Wednesday night for a special screening of film openers hosted by Flux, adds, "I feel like I was a graphic designer all my life but just didn't know what it was until I was in college." At Yale, Fong studied animation, photography and drawing, and now says that her main regret is that she isn't a better writer. Why would a designer need to be a good writer? "There's a way of triangulating from the page to the screen, and the more fluid you are the better," explains Fong. "Everything, even design, works through narrative, so understanding how narrative moves is really important."
Fong's work attends to words; she likes puns and often incorporates word play. In her titles for The Cat in the Hat, Fong extends the Dr. Seuss style into motion, and for the Charlotte's Web titles, she deftly incorporates the book's illustrated storybook style. She likes the way an idea can take shape, moving from the abstract to the tangible, and she enjoys the way words can become images, finding something magical in that transformation. References include concrete poetry at the turn of the last century and the work of the Dadaists and Surrealists. "I am very idea-based," she says. "I think equally in words and visuals, and I love the playfulness of Surrealism, where artists really pushed the idea of play and of form. I like that element of surprise when I've turned something on its head."
This screening is a great chance to see Fong's work, as well as that of four other top-notch designers, including Jamie Caliri of Duck, Danny Yount of Prologue, Garson Yu of yU+co, and Kyle Cooper of Prologue. Each designer has promised to show something brand new, and the show is being presented in conjunction with the Submarine Channel's terrific Web-based resource Forget the Film, Watch the Titles.
the detailsFlux Screening Series
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Hammer Museum
7:00 p.m.: Box office opens for pre-screening reception
8:00 p.m.: Screening and filmmaker presentations
9:30 p.m.: After-party with guest DJ RSVP Admission is free, RSVP suggested.
Seating is first come, first served.
RSVP does not guarantee seating.
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