One of the highlights of our recent trip to NY was a tour of UVPHactory, a production company owned by a childhood friend of Peter Bill, Damijan Saccio. Peter sure set us up for a nice surprise with this one, only mentioning the tour in passing and not telling us a thing about what sort of work Damijan and his crew have done.
So we arrived at a large building in the Little Italy district, and went up a slightly scary old elevator to the second floor that houses UVPH’s studio. The space was quite cool, a open sunny room housing rows of Macs, large windows, shelves of fun books and cute geeky guys working away in Aftereffects and 3D modeling programs. Damijan introduced himself and led us to a conference room to show us some “eye-candy”. “This is what we did for Shakira…for Bjork…for Lady Gaga…for HBO, for Showtime, for the Olympics…” (see above video). I realized that this company is very cool. Incredibly cool. We ask Damijan about the teams workflow, from contracting a job, through conceptualizing, developing, and delivering a finished product. We ask what software programs they use to create their awesomeness… and the answer: Photoshop, AfterEffects, Cinema 4D, Maya, Vue..thrills us, since these are all programs we have learned or could learn in the iDEA program. He talked about some of the challenges they have faced in one of their current projects, a PSA-type video animation for a children’s organization. We looked at some of the files for that video that the animators are currently working on, and see how they build up the color and movement and shadows of the animations.
I found myself forgetting for a moment that I have kids…and a job (sorry Peter)…and had to resist the urge to beg Damijan to take me on as an intern, because working for UVPH is my idea of a dream job. Equally exciting was the realization, looking at what the guys at UVPH were doing, that I could do this. I’m learning what I need to know to have my dream job. This gave me a new appreciation for the skill set I am acquiring through the Expressive Art department at WNMU. Thanks UVPH for the tour and the motivation to keep working towards my goals!
Check these guys out: http://www.uvphactory.com
Peter Bill is an Artist, Activist and Educator. He has, since learning photoshop v. 1.5, been interested in connecting under-represented communities with digital tools so their voices may be broadcast. He has been involved with large scale video projections, guerrilla art actions, and community building since the 90s.
Peter Bill's award winning paint and video landscapes have shown in such diverse venues as The Kitchen(NYC), the Henry Art Gallery(Seattle), FILE Festival(São Paulo, Brazil), and other international venues. He continues in his Oil paintings and video work to weave the painterly with the digital, pixels and paint, indigo and 191970 blue. He envisioned and realized the first time-lapse film festival in North America, the Gila Timelapse Film Festival and has curated and directed shows on three continents. "Art must be realized on the streets, as an agent of change and progress."
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Much of my art has been about creating a vessel, a space for meditation. Through my painting and video installations I hope to create a moment of quietude, a contemplation of this world we have built.
In my mural and documentary film work I have balanced a certain transcendentalism in my heart with my didactic scots-yankee bones. In the public sphere arts role is to inspire and provoke. Therefore in my mural projects I have attempted to involve the local community in the conception and realization of my projects. In my animations and short films I have attempted critiques of the bathetic apocalyptic culture we live in, the false utopia of the California landscape, the contested landscape of New Mexico, and tried to get to the situation on the ground in war torn Bosnia, among other subjects. The world is a complicated, granular place. We cannot oversimplify with our stories, but we can in their telling change opinions, and thus change the world for the better.
