Remember the excitement of being in art school for the first time, finding yourself surrounded by fellow students, all stretching their creative muscles and adding to the collective bubbling brew of imagination and talent? Do you recall how exhilarating it was to feed off the camaraderie, and how the spirited competition spurred everyone to new levels of expression?
Even if your fondest art school memories aren’t quite so rosy, it was a place where you had the freedom to explore, unfettered by mundane practicalities. And while there is no shortage of professional design conferences which purport to inspire and refresh, most are big, anonymous networking events where attendees and presenters alike are mostly trying to impress one another.
There is one gathering that’s unique, although it’s a bit of a well-kept secret. The Art Directors Invitational Master Class, or ADIM, conference has a loyal following of creatives who make it their only “must-attend” year after year. (A confession here: I am an ADIM addict ... but I am not alone!)
ADIM attendees show off their “monstrous” lenticular poster creations before voting on prizewinners. The participants used a layered Photoshop file imported intoa demo version of 3D lenticular-specific software to create the posters, which (mostly) starred themselves.
MASTER OF THE MASTER CLASS
The loyalty ADIM invokes among designers can be summed up in a name: Russell Brown, its wacky master of ceremonies, a tall string-bean-of-a-genius version of PeeWee Herman on speed. While nominally under the aegis of Adobe, Brown is actually a subversive plotter who concocts ever-more-elaborate events to entertain ADIM attendees. This year’s conference (April 29–May 3) was held in San Jose, Calif. And, as always, there was a theme: classic movie monsters.
Thus, when we arrived, the room was tricked-out as Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory, the stage laden with cobwebbed beakers holding sickly colored liquids, a larger-than-lifesize monster strapped down to a slab, bats and bloody body parts. Brown himself was the requisite mad scientist, in a white fright wig that streamed several feet straight over his head. The first competition was already afoot: Whoever guessed Brown’s favorite monster movie could choose a prize from the conference’s own “Little Shop of Horrors.” (It was Mothra.) Extra credit for mimicking monster sounds!
The theatrical effects disguised a high-tech set-up: Every participant (limited to under 100) had a brand-new networked iMac loaded with all the latest software—and some beta and demo versions unlikely to be seen elsewhere—with lots of extra goodies thrown in. (Did I mention that everyone gets a premium suite of Adobe software to take home?)
Posters (left to right) by Amy Silvoy, Daniel Braha, Charlene Charles.
A hilarious original-script short film started the conference off with a bang. Brown was of course the star, endlessly reinventing himself and mugging shamelessly in outlandish transformations created by the award-winning makeup artist-in-residence, Judith Orr. At this point, Brown declared we were “going to learn to play all over again.”
(“Learning to play again” in ADIM’s turbocharged toybox is always fun. But Brown specializes in fun: Under the banner of last year’s conference theme, “Pirates,” attendees made action figures … and not just any action figures. Upon arrival, attendees’ heads were scanned in 3D. The image files were shipped to L.A., where action-figure-sized replicas of the heads were fabricated and shipped back overnight. Painting and sewing, gluing and building, attendees costumed their figures and created their own elaborately themed environments and fantasy narratives.)
SERIOUS SKILL-BUILDING
True to Brown’s promise, we began an intense few days of learning cool new stuff, taught by Adobe product managers. There were more prizes for our creative projects: lenticular monster movie posters. (Remember those Crackerjack prizes with animation effects like winking eyes? For the neophytes, lenticular images appear to move and have depth when viewed from different angles; the technology dates from the ’40s.) “There are two ways to win,” Brown advised. “You can have talent, or you can have talent.”
A team of experts helped us create dramatic special effects as we stayed up way past our normal bedtimes working on our projects—the lab was open all night for ultra-competitive workaholics. Among the late-night denizens was MTV’s Marissa Levy, an ADIM first-timer, who says, “I think the best part of the conference is being taught by people who actually developed and built the software. That is a truly unique experience and one that I will definitely take with me.”
Creative director Jake Weinen, a veteran attendee, comments: “ADIM is a three-ring circus, a boot camp, an Iron Chef competition and a college course all rolled into one. It pulls me out of my typical day of phone calls, e-mails and project deadlines, and forces me to focus on the tools that help me to design.”
“As a designer who works mostly alone in this cyber world,” says participant Gayle Erickson, “it was inspiring to spend the three days among other designers—exchanging ideas, comparing crazy clients and wallowing in all the creativity swirling in the air! Not only do you take home a fantastic project to pump up your portfolio, you make many new friends.”
FROM SPECIAL EFFECTS TO TABLE SHOWS
Surprise guest speaker this year was six-time Oscar-winner Rick Baker, who flew in from London, fresh from the set of The Werewolf (to be released in 2009; Baker created the lycanthropic makeup for Benicio del Toro). He demonstrated how he created realistic creature effects for films like The Thing With Two Heads, The Planet of the Apes and King Kong … as well as Michael Jackson’s classic “Thriller” music video. There was an Adobe connection here, too: Baker started out using traditional media to develop his characters but quickly became an enormous fan of Photoshop.
Topping off every ADIM conference is the closing dinner and talent show … by this time participants are perfectly ready to perform with abandon. But first, there was “the table challenge”— each table had one minute to enact a scene from a classic monster movie. Talent show performances ranged from monster-themed American-Idol-style songs to impossible-to-categorize acts … and if your project didn’t win a prize, you still had a chance to knock ’em dead. (Table 10 won for The Birds.)
Wall Street Journal art director Joseph Paschke—who, as The Wolfman, made the finals of the costume competition—characterizes ADIM as “great fun, extremely challenging, cutting edge, extraordinary and rewarding.” And Tiia Holder, an art director from IBM, sums ADIM up as “a brain-loader, creative recharger and hot mineral spring all in one ... You rarely get to sit next to so many super-creatives anywhere! It gives me a different mirror to see who I am and updates the way I look at and approach all my creative work.”
www.adimconference.com
[TOP] Posters (left to right) by Cathy Krebs, Paul Davis,Louis Fishauf.
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