Category: art direction
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Smithsonian Cooper Hewitt Museum – Bob Greenberg Selects
Mission: Expand and enhance two videos in the Bob Greenberg Selects Exhibition at the Smithsonian Cooper Hewitt Museum (Feb 23 – Sept 9, 2018). One video illustrated his ten principles of design and the other shows ways the objects in the exhibit are connected by design. The creative team wanted to include more objects and find ways to bring them to life and inform viewers how they function.
Solution: The Ten Principles video was a single set of ten objects, one for each principle. We expanded the video to have three sets of ten principles. This allowed us to pair even more of the exhibit objects to the principles they support.
For the connections video, there were several moments that the objects needed to be shown in action to really tell a story about how they connect. We identified 14 or 15 stills that we could re-shoot as live-action or stop-motion to better show the function of each object. I then mapped out how each object needed to be shot, cast the talent and supervised the shoot from pre-production through post-production.
The video monitors are 4k television sets, mounted like portraits. Working closely with the Director of Photography, we dialed in the best possible lighting and framing, with crystal clear focus, knowing that the videos would be shown larger than life in the museum. We had to shoot all of the objects in two days or less, so we ran two sets in tandem and alternated resetting and shooting between the two sets. I also negotiated a temporary lift on the drone ban in the RGA NY office so that we could shoot the drone in live action.
I set up and managed a video testing environment in the prototype studio at RGA so that we could fine tune television calibration to the exact settings we would use in the exhibit. Interfacing with the app developers and museum curators, I prepped the final LISNR media and video files for the museum exhibit. The app they created plays the audio for our video right from your cell phone.
Video Credits:
Guest Curator, Exhibition Host: Bob Greenberg
Museum: Smithsonian Cooper Hewitt
SVP, Head of Global Integration: Jay Zasa
Executive Director of Production: Cindy Pound
Executive Producer: Patrick McCabe
RGA Curator: Laura Wiley-Donohue
Creative Director: Cesar Marchetti, Associate Creative Director: Eli Mavros
Art Directors: Jan Tompkins-Jackson, Andre Vandenberg
Director of Photography: Paulo Netto
Stage Production Coordinator: Elissa Steinhofer
Animation/Compositing: Jan Tompkins-Jackson, Andre Vandenberg, Chris Vranos, Carlos Foxworthy
Editor: Jan Tompkins-Jackson
Colorist: Jan Tompkins-Jackson
Sr. Technology Director: Michael Piccuirro
Sr. Quality Assurance Engineer: Karen Molye
Producer: Irka Seng
Drone Camera Pilot: Aldo Padilla, Bayyina Black
Production assistants: TJ Brogle, Sanjana Sekhar
Models: Sanjana Sekhar, TJ Brogle, Bayyina Black, Jan Tompkins-Jackson
Audio Engineer: Pete KaramVisit the museum: https://www.cooperhewitt.org/2018/01/29/r-gas-bob-greenberg-guest-curates-selects-exhibition/
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United Divas (non-profit)
Mission: As a strategy to encourage more women to explore multiple creative disciplines, Jan co-founded the 501(c)3 non-profit United Divas, with a mission to empower women to be artistic leaders, innovators and role models.
Solution: Her organization brought creative professionals together as a community supporting the arts, with workshops and exhibitions that encouraged other women to pursue their creative goals.
Examples of workshops Jan planned and developed:
Grants Workshop
Web Tools and Marketing Strategies Workshop
Copyright Basics WorkshopThe non-profit operated for a decade, from 2001 – 2011. Their major achievements include giving away 3 arts scholarships to low-income college freshman, spotlighting over 44 women artists as “diva of the month”, hosting multi-media events in Los Angeles, New York City, Miami Beach & Jersey City as well as producing a special edition literary arts magazine called Shouted Whisper.
Below are examples of her branding, experience and marketing design for United Divas.
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LITM.tv
In October of 2010, Jan Tompkins and Jelynne Jardiniano launched the first video art space in Jersey City, at a restaurant-bar-art-gallery called LITM, which stands for love is the message. Jan designed a 3-screen HD video array, which provides a place for films, videos and animation to be exhibited in downtown Jersey City, NJ. Treating it like a closed-circuit television channel, they decided to plan the first two months of programming by inviting both local and national artists to present their work. She also programmed and edited two 1-hour shows that ran short-format video and animation from both local and national artists and filmmakers. To bring it all together in a clean and sophisticated way, Jan created video packaging and branding for both monthly shows.
Each show ran for 1-month during business hours and was paid for by local businesses that purchased ad-space in between programming. LITM continues to screen a variety of media and host film festivals and other special screening events.
