Why are broken McFlurries the perfect example of how our country could work? Stick with me…I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. Do you know how McDonald’s never seems to have ice cream? It’s on the menu, but the machine always seems to be broken. This happens so frequently that over the last decade, it’s become the subject of thousands of memes.
There’s even a site called McBroken that aggregates which machines are working on a giant map.
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To me, McDonald’s ice cream is a perfect illustration of the broken promises of corporate America. We’re sold a bill of goods — from restaurants, airlines, insurance companies, you name it — and once we’re on the hook, the service is shit. It’s the enshittification of corporate America: things that used to work for people simply don’t anymore.
In almost every instance, the reason things don’t work is straightforward corporate greed. Someone prioritized profits over people. You may be thinking to yourself, “Self, why would broken ice cream machines help McDonald’s make money off me? Surely, they’d make more money by selling me ice cream.”
Just a few of the many McDonald’s ice cream memes
But that’s not how McDonald’s makes money. McDonald’s makes money by franchising locations to small business owners — not by selling you food. The franchisees hope to profit from consumers, but the corporation is essentially a real estate holder. A third party, Taylor Company, makes McDonald’s ice cream machines, sells them to franchise owners for about $18k and refuses to tell them anything about the way they work. When they break down, there aren’t simple ways for the store employees to fix them, so a different third party — a company called Kytch — made a gadget that could be inserted in the machines to help McD managers troubleshoot them. I’m not gonna get in the weeds too much here, but check out this WIRED article for the details.
Lina Khan, the Biden-appointed chair of the FTC, fought for the U.S. Copyright Office to introduce a new exemption allowing small business owners and franchisees, including McDonald's operators, the "right to repair" their machinery. This change stems from the FTC's earlier efforts to extend repair rights for commercial equipment. If this sounds somewhat familiar, it’s because another massive victory happened last year when the FTC required John Deere to let farmers fix their own equipment after Biden signed an executive order calling on the FTC to create a country-wide policy to allow customers to repair their own products.
Trump and Elon Musk’s plan for a $2 trillion cut to the federal budget would eliminate the FTC (and many other watchdogs).
The reality is that government has the power to make our lives suck less. Under the last four years of Biden/Harris and the proposals of Harris/Walz, government agencies like the FTC have been and would continue to be staffed by dedicated public servants — policy wonks and justice nerds like Khan. Billionaires and corporations want us to focus on identity politics because if you’re freaking out about how scary a “they/them” pronoun is, you won’t realize how much the corporations are getting away with.
And it’s not just ice cream… here are some of the things Democrats have done over the last four years (and that Harris is proposing) to make things suck less:
Why aren’t these (and the dozens of other victories for everyday people) bigger stories? Our social and news media have a financial interest in rage-baiting all of us to argue about the issues that divide us. I believe this financial incentive exists because if it didn’t, we’d all realize there are simple issues that 70-80% of Americans agree on, that we can fix easily, and that would stop billionaires and corporations from strip-mining the middle class for profits. What do you think?
CONSUMPTION JUNCTION
Three things I’ve read or watched recently that stuck with me.
Doctor Odyssey is the kind of good/bad TV that nearly defies explanation. I say “nearly” because Lucy Mangan’s review in The Guardian defines it pretty well. Here are some snippets: “I want you to understand – this is a show with Shania Twain as a guest star playing a character listed as “Grandma” on IMDb”
“…at the centre of everything, it has Joshua Jackson performing some kind of miracle; playing his part in absolute good faith, pitching it perfectly no matter what new narrative or tonal bonkersness is unfolding round him, grounding it somehow, and yet transcending it at the same time. It is a wondrous thing. I can’t take my eyes off him. It’s the greatest, most extended magic trick ever.” ⤵️
The very dry and risk-averse YouTube channel Legal Eagle is making a presidential endorsement. They don’t do this lightly, so if you’re open to hearing a very pragmatic, non-partisan group explain who you should vote for and why, check it out. ⤵️
Bernie Sanders’ video about how he can disagree with Harris about Gaza and still support her. ⤵️
BEAUTIFUL DATA
One of my favorite graphical interpretations of California’s confusingly written ballot measures is BACK! Ballot.fyi, by creative technologist Jimmy Chion, is a nonpartisan guide that breaks down each ballot measure without bias. This year, it’s a little less visual, taking the style of text messages.
If you’re looking for more detailed info, the nonpartisan CalMatters has you covered. And, if you want to know what progressives are supporting, Knock LA has all the CA measures plus local races.
I COULD WATCH THIS ALL DAY
Instagram favorite Subway Creatures posted this round up of people taking public transit with bulky or ridiculous costumes.
And hello to all my new followers from [checks notes] Fox News….? I hope you find what you’re looking for. I’ll probably post more about the Man Enough campaign and its fascinating ripple effects at some point. But today’s newsletter is a long conversation about artifice vs storytelling with artist and filmmaker Michael Langan.
In all honesty, though, if you started following me because you like my work/vibe, thank you! If you started following me to trash what I do… I’d encourage you to… not do that? This newsletter is about art, design, politics, culture, and the things that bring me joy. If your vibe is trashing other people on the Internet, my challenge for you is to define yourself by the things that bring you joy instead of by yucking other people’s yum.
Anyhow… Michael and I have been friends and collaborators for a long time, and his work always inspires me. Here are a few of my favorite collaborations – both with me as Creative Director and Michael as the writer/director.
Also, in a weird way, even though this interview is with Michael I feel like it’s some of the most in depth I’ve gotten online about my personal relationship with art and commerce.
Alrighty. If you’re a creator, director, an animation nerd, or love process, I think you’ll enjoy this sprawling conversation. If not, maybe just skim through and watch some of the videos. There’s a lot of cool stuff in here.
Jacob All Trades is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Jacob: Hellooooo, Michael! I’m excited to chat with you and I'm so interested in replacement animation. Before we get into that, can you give us a quick background of your path as an artist and filmmaker?
Michael: Yeah, I came to film from a technical angle. I was excited about all the pieces that comprised film: photography and design and music and sound design and drawing and all that stuff. I wasn't as interested in story. So, the films I first got really excited about were pretty mechanical. Playing with time and space in a technical way felt exciting to me. If my first films had any kind of meaning, it was almost incidental. Although, looking back now, I think there's more to it than I gave myself credit for early on.
Michael: I graduated from Rhode Island School of Design in 2007 with a short film called Doxology, which went to a bunch of film festivals. Going to film festivals exposed me to more films like it and to all kinds of different ways of expressing myself through short films. That led to some career-making shorts and then making commercials based on those shorts and alternating making money and then not making money as we do in that kind of rollercoaster of creative life.
Jacob: Do you remember any specific ‘mechanical’ films that you were excited about?
Michael: Yeah. One of the filmmakers that felt special to me was Norman McLaren. He was a Canadian animator — I guess originally Scottish, but his career was in Canada — who was a big part of the National Film Board of Canada. He started working there in the 1950s and made a ton of really wonderful, very playful films that involved all kinds of experimental film techniques. Sometimes were strictly technical;; sometimes they were just beautiful aesthetic experiences; sometimes they had more meaning.
Michael: He got an Academy Award for a film called Neighbors. It was a pixelation film — which is like stop motion animation with people — about loving thy neighbor or killing them.
Jacob: Oh wow, yeah. I totally see the influence on your work. Also, it’s worth noting that this style looks commonplace now but was revolutionary at the time.
Michael: And then, one of the more inspiring film festivals in my early experiences was the Ann Arbor Film Festival. It is brutally experimental. Like, “Sit your ass in that seat. This shit is getting shown at you and fuck you if it's too loud for you, or too strobey or whatever because this is film is art!” It introduced me to a specific kind of filmmaking that is challenging and conceptual for the sake of itself. The abrasiveness is expected. But, Norman McLaren brought experimental film to the public and found a way to do it unpretentiously and bring people in and say, look, holy shit, what this can be welcome. I was really inspired by it.
Jacob: And, now, to backtrack, what exactly is “replacement animation.”
Michael: Replacement animation is when images are played in rapid sequence. Usually there’s a common visual element to unite the sequence. They’re usually roughly registered or positioned in the same place in the frame, but the actual image is different.It takes advantage of the persistence of vision and the fact that you can completely change an image frame by frame.
Jacob: I love that you found this very specific niche animation-wise. We’ve talked a lot about the interplay between the film and art worlds and your background really fascinates me because mine is similar but kind of opposite. I studied at USC’s film school, as well as the USC Roski School of Art & Design — but, I never really felt at home in the film school. To this day, I got an email from the Roski (the art school) congratulating me on having a doc short qualify for the Oscars, and the film school doesn’t even reply to my emails.
During my time at Roski, one of my favorite professors was Tad Beck who did some video art. Charlie White also taught a course, but I think it was only for graduate students. Otherwise, my college experience was very much film at the film school; art at the art school. Always separate. And, that’s not really the way my brain works. I want to combine them. I’m always a little jealous of people who went to actual art schools, so I'm curious about what the program was like at RISD and if they taught video in the art school.
Michael: I didn't have too many video classes outside of foundational stuff in my sophomore year because I went pretty whole hog on the animation program.So, like the big major is painting. Printmaking is a big one. The most like avant-garde major is glass blowing. There were a couple, but I don't know if vocational is the best term, but industry- or career-oriented programs. Architecture is serious. Industrial design is serious. Most of the other majors were “Art art,” including FAV (Film Animation and Video).
When I first toured RISD’s FAV program before college, I had just toured SCAD because I was interested in the technical stuff. SCAD has a Dolby mixing lab. I came to RISD, and I was like, “Where's your 5.1 lab?” The girl giving the tour said, “I don't know what that is, but this is a Steenbeck.” And I was like, “What the fuck is a Steenbeck?”
Jacob: And what is a Steenbeck?
Michael: A Steenbeck is an editing machine. It has reels of film that move across a tiny little projector, and it has a projection screen that's maybe 10 inches diagonal, where you can see your film right in front of you. You can chop the film, cut it, and splice it and immediately see what it looks like.
I think that they're phasing out film editing (or already have) in foundational film classes, which I think is such a crime. Not for nostalgia, but because of the value of learning to cut — understanding you have to feel it viscerally to commit to your choices. You have to think, “I’m gonna cut this piece of film in half right here and fuck up my film because it’s the right thing to do.” You know?
Jacob: Totally. When I came to USC, it was the first year they had removed actual film from the students' workflow, and I was so bummed about it.
Steenbeck 16mm flatbed ST 921 from The Archive of the Danish Broadcasting Corporation / DRs Kulturarvsprojekt
Michael: RISD FAV was all about intuition. A bunch of my teachers had come through Cal Arts and learned from Jules Engel, this experimental animation-oriented guru over there.
My classes were all about validating the artist's intuition, and anything that came out was right. Sure, there was an editing process to filmmaking, but it was more like feeling around in the darkness for threads of light to pull down, weaving into a film, and finding ideas and feelings within yourself to get there.
It's inefficient and doesn't necessarily lend itself to films that hold together in a traditional way, but you end up with some pretty cool different stuff, and it teaches you to trust what's inside of you. Story was not a word that ever entered the classroom.
Outside of those classes, people tended to look down on conceptual art. Anytime a piece of art was overtly trying to make meaning, it was like, “Oh, God, what are you doing?! That’s not what art is for.” And that was me, too. I was in that camp. And many years later, I’m like, “Oh, God, it’s all about the meaning!”
Jacob: Obviously, both are important. But, yeah, there are people who do the opposite and jam meaning down your throat with the most traditional visuals possible.
Michael: And also, I mean, why are you making meaning? Are you making meaning to try and sound like what you’re doing is important because you’ve heard that what you’re talking about is important? Is it actually important to you? I think the key is, what emotionally resonates with your core?
What I’m trying to do now is find the things that are important to me, the ideas and the problems, and bring them out creatively and use the art skills to do that.
Jacob: That's fascinating. I feel like I've recently settled into the opposite but with kind of the same result. I found myself spending so much time trying to figure out “What’s the meaning? What do I want to say?” And that paralyzes me. So in the last few years I’ve settled into this – I guess I would call it trust – this trust that I am unable to make something that doesn’t have meaning. That I should just start making something that’s interesting to me for whatever reason and trust that by the end of it, it will have pulled the meaning or the feeling inside of me out so that it’s obvious. It’s the same end result, but I’ve taken a completely opposite path to get there.
Michael: That's the way we were taught to do it in school.Which is great. And, you can find doing it in school. I was doing that with Doxology. I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing, but I realized by the end “Oh, this is about your relationship with God and religion and bullshit.”
Jacob: It’s so interesting to me that our backgrounds are so similar but so different. You’re a filmmaker/artist who went to art school and got drilled in the art making side of it and now you’re re-embracing story. I’m a filmmaker/artist who mostly went to film school and had story and theory drilled into me. And, I’ve had to reacquaint myself with, like, “What is novel or delightful about this to me?” It’s just more proof to me that both are necessary and whichever way you’re trained, you’ll get pulled toward the other to balance it out.
Michael: I've taken a few classes from a story writing dude named Corey Mandel who I really, really, really, really, really have enjoyed learning from. He talks about the idea of the conceptual brain and the intuitive brain. And, if USC is hardcore conceptual and RISD is hardcore intuitive, like, you can integrate these things together and learn how to spend time in each zone when you need that feeling or input.
Jacob: That's super interesting. Okay, so when was the first time you encountered replacement animation?
Michael: My professors, bless them, would go off to animation and film festivals and see wonderful work and then bring it back to the classroom.
Jacob: Wow, that's huge. Especially pre-Internet.
Michael: Yeah, it was everything. The whole culture of swapping DVD screeners and before that VHS and God knows what else. Like, they brought back the film While Darwin Sleeps by a British filmmaker named Paul Bush. He made that in 2004. He’d spent some time in a museum full of insect specimens and used photographs of these similar insects to create shifting replacement animation of their forms. I thought it was so cool and so weird and different.
Michael: I thought that was super cool, but I didn’t do anything with it. I didn’t play with it myself. Then, my junior year I took a one minute animated film called Snail to . It was the first film festival I got into and went to. And, I went while I was working on Doxology. And it just blew my mind and everything. It was that experience of, you know, “10 films are just like, oh my God, what am I watching? And then the 11th was like, holy shit, I, I didn't know this was possible!”
Jacob: I always wonder about that kind of programming. The 11th film had a huge impact on you, but do you think that for someone else it was films one through seven were intolerable and number eight was the one that blew their mind?
Michael: Yeah. It's totally subjective.So, while I was at Ann Arbor, I saw a film called Market Street by a guy named Tomonari Nishikawa. It’s a black and white, silent, five minute replacement animation short shot on film that he shot going down Market Street in San Francisco. And, he’s animating the grates on the ground and the lamp posts and the wires and things like that.
Jacob: Wow, it makes my head melt to think about doing something like that on film.
Michael: Totally. I soon learned that when you're doing replacement animation, you get into a registration groove as you're shooting and you use the alignment marks and all the little lines in your viewfinder become hinges and become ways to line up different things frame to frame as you’re moving down the street. You’re kind of doing this improvisational animation. I don’t know if he had a digital process in there or had an optical printer but I doubt it. I think it was probably all in camera. And, it’s very very fast. It’s 24 frames per second, so it’s just buzzing.
Jacob: I know animation is frequently doubled from 12 frames per second to get 24 fps for playback. Is that true of replacement animation?
Michael: It varies. My favorite frame rate is 15 fps doubled to 30.
Jacob: Why 15?
Michael: 24 is so fast that your brain can’t appreciate the individuality of the images. 12 is so slow it feels clunky unless you’re really emphasizing each image. 15 just feels like the happy medium to me.
So, after seeing Market Street I was enamored with replacement animation. It just kind of knocked around in the back of my head for a while. Then, I brought Doxology to Slamdance in 2007 or 2008 and they commissioned me to make a short film for $99 – which was something called the Slamdance $99 Special. And, so I was like, okay, awesome. I'm gonna take my Canon DSLR and I saw Market Street before I lived in San Francisco but now I live in San Francisco… so I’m going to go make my Market Street.
I shot Dahlia with my DSLR and did a whole bunch of hyper stabilizing and repositioning of things. I did as much as I could in camera, but there's only so much you can do. Then I went through frame by frame and registered everything to, I think later, like they started to make these hypers where you start to get like stabilized.
Michael: Imagery in video and things start to look weird and interesting. And I'll pull in also. I had seen a film called Vision Point in School that used, it used I'll use the term hyper stabilization basically perfectly registering your image on a given point. And now you'll see this shit all over Instagram where like people's heads are like in just in one place while everything else is moving.
Michael: And so that idea of like being really careful with your stabilization and doing that by hand frame, by frame to get it perfect both in position and scale.
Jacob: For people who aren’t in animation, I don’t think they realize how time consuming this process is.
Michael: It's faster than hand drawn animation. That was one of the things I discovered in school. I don't love drawing, honestly. Like, I like drawing from life for fun. But I don't make characters. And in my early attempts to make any kind of like hand drawn animated… it wasn’t how I wanna pull my teeth. But, apparently, I am willing to pull my teeth compositing and re re-registering images and stuff like that.
And, you get into a groove, like your fingers are just doing the shortcuts and you're like, I'll the next frame, like, and and before you know it, you have some sequences. So I went out with the $99 and basically it just paid for. My friends to have some food while they watched my back in the middle of the night as I shot Dahlia in Golden Gate Park.
So, I took sidewalk cracks and parking meters and flowers and different recurring visual motifs of San Francisco and put 'em all together in kind of a love letter to San Francisco. I finished that and it premiered at Slamdance. I thanked Toka in the credit because Market Street had been so inspiring to me.
Jacob: Yeah. It's for sure like a riff on it, but it is, yeah, it's your version, but I see what you mean.
Michael: I say this because I started to feel possessive over a technique once I started working in it more. I still struggle with those feelings, especially with techniques. But, for better or for worse, they really don’t belong to one person. All our ideas can influence other people, and once AI starts to do its weird thing, anyway… you start to wonder where the lines are and how derivative works should be distinguished.
Jacob: Interesting.
Michael: And, so I went on to continue using replacement animation in some commercial stuff. I got to do a couple of ads for Art.com, which sells posters and can frame the posters for you. They had this massive catalog of basically every famous 2D work of art ever and said “have fun!” And, I just like did that kind of intuitive search through their collection looking for commonalities and patterns. You know, like, 15% of this stuff is naked women reclining and 10% is clocks, for example.
Jacob: It's data visualization in a way.
Michael: Yeah! So, ingesting all this stuff was a really fun process. So I had all the files and I would use folders as my light box.
Jacob: So you're just sorting all of, like looking through basically. Oh, I mean, ostensibly, if it's Art.com you ostensibly have access to, I mean, every, right? Like, from Mona Lisa to the Pink Floyd album cover that people get posters of for their dorm rooms.
Michael: Well, to be fair, it’s heavily European and American. But yeah, it’s a huge collection. My process started with categorization. Then, once I had categories I'd start to line them up in an After Effects sequence and play around with the patterns and shapes that started to emerge.
Jacob: Was that your process on Dahlia too? Or, were you just like, I'm gonna take a bunch of pictures and then see what I start finding. And at a certain point you kind of dialed or, you know, focus in and then let that be your guide? Or how, what, what is the what, what was the process on Dahlia and then how did it change for the Art.com piece?
Michael: I mean, similar processes where your exploration – whether of a city, or a catalogue of art — is finding what you think is interesting and lining it up and then just refine, refine, refine, refine, refine. And, you always end up with at least 50% more material than ends up in the thing.
Jacob: How long does something like that take?
Michael: It's not insane. It's, I, I wouldn't I would say that the whole thing was maybe like, I don't know, 300-400 hours. Most of my commercial work is so heavily previs-ed. So, we had a clear shot list going into the live action shoot.
Jacob: Oh yeah! This was live action — I’d forgotten.
Michael: Well, it’s animated, but it’s Pixilation. So, it’s using actual people as stop motion.
Jacob: And you’re not talking about images that are pixelated, right?
Michael: Pixilation predates the word pixelation. Pixelation is, yeah, when you have squares of, when you have visible pixels, pixelation. Pixilation was coined by Norman McLaren before pixels were invented… because he thought it made people look like Pixies.
Jacob: Oh wow that’s so silly.
Michael: Isn't it great? Technically, I don't know if this would be pixilation or basically this would be kind of a different kind of replacement animation maybe, but it's replacement animation with people. The focus is on the art, but because Art.com is selling things, it was important for them to all be in frames that you can actually buy.
Jacob: So walk me through your process on the shoot.
Michael: In pre-vis we picked all the pieces. I figured out what dimensions they’d need and what kind of frames would look good. We sent that info to Art.com and they built them all. On the day, we had maybe a hundred frames, and I assigned different frames to each image. We had an onion skin, like a semi-transparent frame by frame reference on set. So standing in front of the camera is a person holding a frame, that doesn’t have the actual image in it, because I was just going to comp that in.
I know that the frame is slightly smaller than the image that's going to go into it, so I can comp it without any issues. And then we just went through a cycle of, I don’t know, maybe 36 people or something and each new person would come in and line up the frame so I could see it on the monitor.
Jacob: I assume this is a still camera and something like Dragon Frame to track the onion skinning?
Michael: Yeah, we just spent the day like that. You can’t see it, I didn’t push it hard enough, but the sun is going buy in real time in the background of a real room.
Jacob: Wow, that’s a super cool level of detail. Okay, I want to shift a little to talk about the commercial side of it all. I’m curious how you went from making Dahlia to getting hired by Art.com. Did they reach out to you? Did you pitch and think, “oh, I want to use this style I did for Dahlia”? How did you become the go-to guy for replacement animation commercials?
Michael: I had a really fantastic situation with this company called Mechanism in San Francisco (which is now a big agency). There were conversations happening in the background that I wasn’t paying attention to half the time. The other half I was involved in a pitch process to clients. I had made Doxology in college and was kind of a go-to video guy for Upper Playground, this skateboarding and graffiti brand until I got laid off in the 2008 recession.
Michael: I don’t remember specifically, but I think I started a conversation with Mechanism through the online exposure for Doxology, which had gotten some nice love from Motionographer – which, especially at the time, was a big launching point for people.
As a result of being in Motionographer, a production company or aagency in Barcelona saw Doxlogy. And, instead of just ripping off my car/tango scene, they hired me to come out and replicate it.
Jacob: What a bunch of sweethearts for doing that. Like, to have the opportunity to rip you off like most companies will, and instead just hire you is just… God bless them.
Michael: Yeah. My producer was so scared when I landed. She was like, “Oh my God, you're so young.” And, and they like hired a more experienced guy to like sit over my shoulder in the edit just to make sure I wasn't doing anything wrong. He literally got paid to sit over my shoulder and I did the job.
After that job, I’d been talking with Mechanism and they said “let’s work together.
Jacob: Was it like a full-time creative job? Or just, “We're gonna use you when we can use you.”
Michael: It was framed as director representation. But, they didn’t represent me the way directors are traditionally represented where a brief comes in and you send your reel and if it gets selected you pitch on it. It was more client direct, which is the best.
Jacob: Oh yeah, that’s always a more secure and more creatively fulfilling way to work.
Michael: So Art.com came to Mechanical and said they wanted a brand anthem thing. They were like, “Well, Langan does this crazy shit and showed them Dahlia and talked about how we can use this technique with the art. I probably wasn’t involved in all the conversations that didn’t lead to jobs, but in this case, they were excited about the idea and I got brought in.
Jacob: That’s so great to have a relationship with a production company or agency that understands your skillset, when to bring you to the table, and how to create opportunities for everyone to get something out of it.
Michael: Yeah, I was like “this is Magic.” Art.com was great but a bigger example was for Pepsi. Mechanism was pitching Pepsi on a whole campaign for the Super Bowl half time show. Pepsi was the sponsor and Beyonce was the headliner. My buddy Tony, who is another director, was figuring out how we could use UGC combined with replacement animation.
Jacob: UGC as in User Generated Content.
Michael: Yeah. But UGC wasn’t a big thing quite yet. And there was just, you know, the stakes were so high. We had, I'm gonna look at my notes. We had 120,000 user submissions, and the campaign got five and a half billion impressions. So, like, most of the people in the world saw this one point.
Jacob: And, you directed a Super Bowl commercial!
Michael: Right, which I thought would secure my future.
[we both laugh… this industry is so unpredictable]
Michael: It was awesome. I went out and bought a nice turntable and a stereo and was like “I’m gonna take care of myself after this.” I decided to move to LA shortly after, and was like “I’m just gonna walk in and they're just gonna roll out the red carpet for me.” I thought that somehow I could parlay the idea of Super Bowl commercial into like any kind of commercial. And it doesn't necessarily work that way.
Jacob: Well, that’s the double edged sword of being known for a niche technique. If you’re the go-to guy and a Super Bowl commercial comes up in that style, you’re going to get the gig. But if you wanna do other stuff, people are like…. “Yeah, but he’s just the replacement animation guy.”
Michael: Well, I kind of abandoned the model I had been relying on, which was like making my own art, and then paid opportunities would come about as a result of me making stuff. Instead, I was like “I’m just gonna be reaching for things instead of creating things.”
Anyway, a couple years later, another RISD animation student, Conner Griffith, came out with a film called Ripple which used replacement animation in a way I’d always wanted to, but was afraid of. He took satellite photos from Google Earth and stuff, and and some of his own photography and wove these things together to create these beautiful synesthetic tapestries of replacement animation of the world as seen from above. I had thought about that but was afraid I’d get in trouble for copyright stuff.
Michael: It was so well done. A part of me was saying “Oh, fantastic. Look at all this new stuff!” But a part of me was also like, “Oh, but this is my domain.” I started to realize this niche wasn’t a thing I owned. We can all contribute to it, and maybe I’ve explored what I want to explore. At the time, I was also getting more interested and invested with stories.
Jacob: So were you just like, I’m done?
Michael: Well, I was in Los Angeles working for a visual effects company called Luma helping develop an original slate of films. I was busting my ass, but I was learning, and I was basically getting paid to learn about story.
A brief came in from a production company I was in touch with for a big Coca-Cola summer spot with replacement animation. People jumping into swimming pools, stuff like that. It was basically the best version that commercial replacement animation could be in my mind. And I was not interested in it at all.
They were like “But you’re the guy!” But, I was focusing on something else. That’s the moment I really understood that’s not where my heart was anymore. And that it was okay.
Jacob: That's fascinating for so many reasons. I had an experience recently that really inspired me to be more open minded about ownership. I learned about an incredible Austrian designer and printmaker based in Berlin named Julia Schimautz. She mostly does animation using Riso prints, but there was a quick ten second animation she’d done using printed and then shredded photographs.
Jacob: I was talking about making a video with a musician friend, and one song off his album really inspired me to riff on Julia’s technique. It’s a duet about a couple coming to terms with not being together, and I thought it would be really beautiful to visualize them in two separate spaces, overlaid with this technique. Literally in the same space, but unable to connect.
A page from my treatment for the music video
Jacob: I reached out to Julia and said, “Hey, I'm a director. I have a friend who's a musician. I saw this thing you did and — with your permission — I would love to expand on the idea for a music video.”
I don't know yet if I have a clear opinion about what’s right or wrong about riffing on someone else’s technique or style. I think my definition used to be 100% you don’t do that… and now it’s a little more like, I don't know, we're all kind of having a big visual conversation. Where I’m at now, I wouldn’t do it without contacting the artist. If she said no, that would have been it. But, her response incredibly gracious and high-minded. She’s like, “I made this, but you're an artist and you can riff on anything you see.” That's how I want to be with my work, but I'm not there yet.
Michael: That's so cool you got that response.
Jacob: Totally. On the previous video I made with this artist, my friend Philip, we featured a ton of memes and illustrations. And I reached out to every single person whose work we wanted to use and asked if we could use them in the video. Most people were down, some people said no, some were like “Hey, I made that for a company and weirdly don’t own it so I can’t give you the rights.”
Jacob: And I was just like, I'm asking, like, I'm not, like, they're like, if you, if you use it, I'm gonna come after you. And I'm like, if I was gonna do like I'm coming to you, why would, like, why are, anyway? But the, the other thing that, what you were just saying really made me think of is when you were talking about what's his face, McLaren and, and bringing these more experimental, visual, you know, styles or techniques or whatever to the masses.
Jacob: Commercial work is interesting because on the one hand, you’re mostly helping big corporations — many of which are actively fighting against our planet, against a living wage, treating people fairly, etc. — but on the other hand, those jobs are the ones that pay your bills. And, on top of that, because commercials are short form, there’s often an expectation that you have to be more visually artistic or experimental than you can be with narrative projects. And, why be protective when ultimately it’s a corporation that will own the work. Why not let other artists riff on it?
Michael: It is always evolving and I feel differently about something like visual echoes — a newer technique I’ve been working on — than I do about replacement animation because it’s still something I’m playing with and there are technical developments that are unique to me.
Jacob: Explain visual echoes.
LEFT OFF HERE
Michael: developments.
Jacob: when you say visual echoes, are you talking about like, like the turntable thing that you did? Is that a vi or what? What would you, what is visual
Michael: So the original technical term is actually chronophotography. That’s when it was using stills. Eadweard Muybridge was kind of adjacent to this technique. It was really developed as a scientific learning tool. You know, the classic image of studying how a horse moves.
Eadweard Mubridge: Photographic Study of A Man Jumping A Horse | The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Rogers Fund
Michael: The technique used strobe lights to juxtapose different moments in time, all in the same image. And, what you end up with is a kind of visual echo showing a progression of motion in animal or a person all in one frame together. McLaren riffed on this in 1968 with his film Pas de Deux. In 2010, my friend Tara Mayer and I made a film called Choros which was a riff on that technique, but using new technology and compositing techniques that weren’t available to McLaren.
Michael: There are definitely things I still would like to do to evolve that technique that are technically expensive and difficult. As cameras do more interesting things and our ability to record the volume of space changes, I’m excited to play with it. BUt, I know I’m going to see someone else do things first and I’ll just have to go “Oooh…” and keep walking.
Jacob: If someone came along and said, “Hey, we want you to take that style and do a soda ad…” Would you feel like this was your chance to put a budget behind something you’re experimenting with? Or would that feel too personal to do for a commercial?
Michael: It depends what it is. I've had that chance. I was developing a whole thing for a big client and it didn’t go. It’s hard. I really don't wanna make the world the worst place or cause too much more childhood obesity with my career.
Jacob: Okay, one last question before we wrap it up: Do you feel like there's a responsibility for artists when they're talking about these kinds of techniques to cite each other? The way you’ve been talking this whole interview, you source your inspiration really well. It’s almost like people giving the provenance of a piece of art, but for a specific technique.
Michael: I think that credit where credits due is really important. So often people just do a thing and don't mention anyone else who helped you make that thing, which includes people who you don't have a relationship with. If you're creating something where the general assumption is that you, like you came up with this amazing, beautiful thing and you're actually heavily referencing something else, it's absolutely imperative that you credit because like we all, we all need to support each other and help each other. I hope, for example, that more people employ Paul Bush to do commercials. I’d hate to steal a gig he was due.
And without that it's very easy for people to kind of just kind of wither away. And you know, I hope that more people employ Paul Bush to do commercials with replacement animation. I would hate to steal a gig that he was due, you know,
Jacob: Well, I really appreciate the way you talk about art. It’s a wealth of information, and I’m excited to go watch every video you referenced and go down those rabbit holes and be inspired. Thanks for chatting with me!
Michael: This was really, really fun. Thanks, Jake.
There ya go! Were you into this? Is this type of longer form content something you’d like to see more of on Jacob All Trades? Sound off in the comments!
And, before you go, here’s a quick plug for one of Michael’s latest films, coming soon:
Thanks for reading Jacob All Trades! This post is public so feel free to share it.
Happy Thursday. I’ve never felt more sure of my creative ability and less sure of my career path. This industry is wild. If anyone needs a creative director, director, or anything else from my unique bag of tricks…. I am looking for work! Enjoy the newsletter, and thanks for reading. – Jacob
NEW WORK: MAN ENOUGH
I creative directed and directed this campaign for Creatives For Harris. In the last 24 hrs, it’s racked up half a million views on TikTok, been reposted by Vote Save America, and gotten a great write-up in Fast Company. I’ve felt validated by the response and the incredible experience of working with a crew of volunteers to bring this into the world. I plan to say more about the process, but for now, check it out!
I think this resonates with people because it’s a view of masculinity we see in our lives but is rarely reflected in the media — especially when some of the loudest voices on the subject are the most insecure and bombastic. Our friends, family, and neighbors are complex men. They can change a tire and enjoy a romcom; chug a beer and run to the store to get tampons for their wives and daughters — the strongest men are the most secure in their masculinity. With the rise of role models like Tim Walz and Doug Emhoff on the national stage, I think the left is finally finding its footing on how to talk about masculinity — I think we’re overdue for a redefinition of what it means to be a man in America and I hope this campaign can start to shape that conversation. Because even though it’s more sketch comedy than political ad, what these men are saying is true — except being afraid of bears. A bear will straight-up kill you.
Here are the :30s…
TWO TRUTHS AND A LIE: SEQUEL EDITION
Two of these are a real thing; one of them is not. Click through to find out…
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DO SOMETHING
We’ve got less than a month before the election, and if you care about who wins but haven’t gotten involved, now’s the time. Here are some great orgs I recommend:
Environmental Voter Project Call folks who care about the environment but don’t always vote. There are (amazingly) enough in each swing state to tip things.
Vote Save America Volunteer with Crooked Media like one of the cool kids.
The States ProjectFocused specifically on the state legislature races that can swing control for civil liberties, redistricting, vote certification and more while building up a diverse and representative Democratic bench.
Ground Game LA If you’re in the Los Angeles area, canvas for progressive candidates and get paid $25/hr to do it!
CREATIVE RESOURCES
I’m constantly looking for images to help pitch my ideas to others and visualize them for myself. I love Shot Deck, but I was recently told about a(n even better?) tool called Flim.ai. Yes, it has AI in the name, it uses AI to search (presumably) but all the images generated are from actual media.
I did a test search for a short I’m working on and was delighted to see immediately helpful results. Also, it felt very validating that the image I had in my head references a Kurosawa film.
STATE LEVEL EXPERIMENTS
A new study from Science.org (and repackaged here on WaPo) shows that of the five states who have begun limiting food waste, the most successful has been Massachusetts. Bans in other states like California have had no measurable impact due to weak compliance.
So, what is Massachusetts doing right?
Extensive Composting Infrastructure: The state has developed a robust network of composting facilities, making it easier for businesses to divert food waste.
Clear Regulations: The food waste ban is straightforward, with no confusing exemptions for businesses.
Strong Enforcement: Massachusetts actively enforces its laws, increasing compliance through regular checks and penalties for noncompliance.
Outreach Efforts: The state conducted extensive outreach to educate businesses about the rules and the importance of participation.
THIS WEEK IN CHAOTIC GOOD
The story of an artist who got fed up with a road sign that made no sense… so he pretended to be a highway worker and fixed it himself. I’ve heard legends about this since art school, but here’s an Instagram story that packages it really clearly:
On Rosh Hashanah, I was explaining Tashlich to our five year old. Tashlich (literally “casting off”) is a Jewish atonement ritual performed on the afternoon of the first day of Rosh Hashanah where you metaphorically cast your sins (bread crumbs) into a moving body of water. The idea is to reflect on parts of yourself you want to improve by physically discarding the things you regret. Here’s how that convo went down:
Me: … so you think of something you want to do better at and then throw the bread in the water.
Five Year Old: Okay. I wish I was better at drawing princesses.
M: Oh. Yeah, I see. No, it’s more like things you want to change about yourself.
FYO: I don’t want to change anything about myself. I love who I am.
M: That’s really great. I love who you are too. What about things you do that you know you shouldn’t…. like, you could think about how sometimes you hit your sister instead of using your words.
FYO: I really don’t think we should keep talking about this.
LITERALLY JUST A BRAG
I got my first Sunday acceptance to the NYT Crossword. I’ve got three puzzles in the queue with them and can’t wait to share them with you. If you’ve ever succeeded at a very niche hobby that almost nobody cares about, you know how I feel!
Alrighty, that’s it for this issue. If you enjoyed what you read, please leave a comment and/or share the newsletter using the links below. (For real, please comment. More people come up to me in person and tell me they like the newsletter than comment on it online).
And, if you can afford to, I’d love for you to become a paid subscriber so that I can keep making cool stuff!
Here’s a new spot I creative directed and EP’d for Creatives For Harris that updates the classic Coors Light campaign from 2002 to be less… well… creepy. In case you’re not familiar, the original ad plays on the classic(?) trope of “Hey, wouldn’t it be hot if you could have sex with twins?”
I feel like these were everywhere from 2002-2005ish. And, their tight structure and punchy editing felt like a great template to push a new kind of masculinity. I jumped in as creative director, got amazing comedy writer Juliet Seniff to write the lyrics, musician Adam Tressler to redo the music, and found a great editor on the Creatives For Harris slack channel named Chandler Kilgore-Parshall who edited it all together. Here’s what we cooked up:
Also, I’ll be making my in-print crossword debut tomorrow! Universal Puzzles (via Andrews McMeel) will publish my puzzle “Undercover Agent” in a couple dozen different print newspapers tomorrow. It will be online here on 10/2 and available in your local newspaper if your local newspaper is one of the following:
7Q is where I ask a creative person I admire seven questions. Today’s guest is Tarreyn Van Slyke. Tarreyn is a multi-hyphenate creative living in Los Angeles. She spends most of her time in social media, consulting brands, and talent on their digital presence, creating content for TikTok and Instagram, and writing the bi-weekly newsletter From Tarreyn. In her free time, she loves traveling the world, eating sandwiches, visiting every analog film photo booth she can find, and hanging out with her husband and cat.
Tarreyn’s newsletter, From Tarreyn focuses on leading a more creative, joyful, and intentional life. It’s one of my favorites — highly recommend.
1. What’s your earliest memory of wanting to live a creative life?
If I’m being honest, I don’t remember ever thinking there was any other option. I grew up in a highly creative household—my mother was a Painter, and my dad was a playwright—so seeking expression and validation through the arts and creative projects was the only way I knew how to do things. I vividly remember being on stage for the first time at seven years old and feeling that adrenaline, that kinetic energy of live performance, and the connection with the audience and thinking, “Yes. I want this forever.”
2. Do you have any routines, rituals, or processes that help you get into the zone creatively?
I do! Because most of my work is on screens (social content, video & photo editing, writing), I like to recenter with tactile things. I love to journal – it helps me clear the cobwebs and jumpstart my thinking for the day. I do bullet journaling and junk journaling, too. I’m also very specific about my environment—nice-smelling candles, the right lighting, and listening to music (without lyrics) while I work are all helpful to get me in the right headspace. And I also almost always have fresh flowers in view.
3. What’s the project that got away? OR your dream project that you’ve not yet been able to make happen?
Oh gosh, there are so many dream projects. I love collaborating with people, so I have a lot of dream partnerships in my head that all have nothing to do with each other. I’d love to design a wallpaper, launch a collection of themed analog film photobooths in public spaces, work on a massive-scale floral installation, create a line of journals and notebooks. (To name a few.) And I suppose I’d have to join the long list of folks who want to start a podcast. My goal is always to help inspire creativity in others, so most of my dream projects come down to some form of that in one way or another.
4. In another lifetime, what is a job you’d love to do but think you’d be shit at? A job you would hate but would be excellent at? And a job you’d love to do and think you’d be excellent at?
I would love to be a fashion designer, but I don’t have the patience or imagination. I’m so inspired by the astounding things people can come up with using fabric and I love how beautiful clothing makes people feel, but aside from not having the skillset, I think the pressure and scrutiny attached to that industry would drown me. I’m pretty organized, and I love making spreadsheets, so I think I’d be really good at project management, but it would completely chip away at my soul. Maybe this is a bit delusional, but a job I think I’d enjoy and be good at is being a talk show host. Probably a cozy daytime one, not late night.
5. If you could give any piece of advice, encouragement, or wisdom to yourself when you first started, what would it be?
Put your blinders on. Stop comparing your work and worth to others, and just keep making stuff. There were so many abandoned projects throughout my 20s that if I had stuck with them, I truly believe they could have gone somewhere. Dealing with the fear of putting yourself out there is real. I think I’ve let insecurity incapacitate me sometimes and prevent me from pushing through the challenging phase to the reward. Creativity is great and all, but commitment, confidence, and consistency are what produce results.
Amelia Earhart | Smithsonian Collection
6. What’s a thing you wish existed for you to enjoy as an audience member (but isn’t a thing you’d ever make)?
Honestly, I’m always hungry for more media featuring interesting women in period costumes: Little Women, Marie Antoinette, The Favourite—that kind of thing. I was totally obsessed with the show Dickinson, and I could've watched five more seasons. Let’s get the Joe Wright miniseries on Marie Curie or a Yorgos Lanthimos movie about what happened to Amelia Earhart.
7. What’s something (a show, a talent, a tool, a song, place, recipe — truly anything) you’re loving right now that you think more people should know about?
I just went to Japan for the first time this spring and returned with major annoying exchange student energy, like the kid who studies in France for a semester and starts wearing berets every day. I know that saying Japan is amazing is not a hot take, but there are so many elements of their culture I wish we had here. There’s a patience and care that goes into every detail, no matter how small. I love that they embrace imperfections with the ideas/practices of Kintsugi and Wabi Sabi. I love a lot of ideology in both Shintoism and Buddhism, and I was blown away by all the rituals at shrines and temples. The Virgo in me also loves all the order and pragmatic elements (So clean! So orderly!) And the food… oh my GOD, the food.
I haven’t been to Japan (yet) but here’s my own Kintsugi experience with my mom at the Japanese Friendship Garden in San Diego
Thanks for reading! Leave a comment below to let us know what you liked. And… who should I interview next? lmk in the comments :D
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