Creative Report
Neneh Patel
I looked at the multidisciplinary designer and animation director Daniel Savage. His work covers a range of skills, from design, animation, branding and short films, to editorial work. He has worked with a number of clients such as The New Yorker (printed and corresponding animated editorial); Al Jazeera (informative animation about Marshall McLuhan) and Google. The mixture of sound and moving image can be traced back to his education; he originally went to school to study music, ‘but for some reason was drawn to the design program and switched’. Up until then, his focus had been on becoming a musician and the simplicity of his imagery is mirrored in the pared back music that accompanies them.
Editorial work for The New Yorker
His process similarly encompasses the combination of different software programs and has always been focussed on using Photoshop and After Effects ‘with some Illustrator sprinkled in’. The usual process is to sketch on paper and then draw directly into Photoshop, but involves a lot of back-and-forth between Photoshop and After Effects whilst cleaning up and animating the assets. He does use some traditional work, but tends to ‘always manipulate it’. Stills from Look-See
The exercise of working between programs is reflected in the way that Savage works on projects; having ‘usually two at the most’ when they are larger pieces, and supplementing that with ‘smaller editorial jobs on top of that’. The crossover between editorial and personal projects has allowed him to gain clients - the animation for Al-Jazeera was a result of his short film Look-See which sums up his approach; having to ‘say more with less’ in order to compete with larger production companies that have almost unlimited resources. In an interview with It’s Nice That, he mentions the freedom he had in the project in choosing the philosopher McLuhan and the issues with matching up the timing of the speech to the animation. Talking about the project; ‘I love having a script to work with’ as he can make physical copies in order to ‘sketch thumbnails directly on it’. This is the translated into digital work and subsequently, moving image.
Stills from the Marshall McLuhan short
Landing pages for his two curation projects
Citing Warren Buffet as an inspirational figure, he did have some advice for design students ‘move to a big city after you graduate and be active in the community’. This sense of community has been instrumental in recent projects; Mixed Parts and Yule Log. Mixed Parts is an online community for animators - anyone can browse the site, but to be able to post, visitors must request an invitation. Similarly, he has created Yule Log, which is a platform to boost publicity for animators and allows them to generate money for a charity each year. The project is curated by guest judges who are highprofile animators and artists. The original Yule Log being a gift to the city of New York, current iterations of the festival are a celebration of animation for the online community that brings the yule log tradition into the digital age.