Q&A with Salt Creative Director/Partner Ian Douglass

Ian Douglass is creative director/partner at Salt, a creative design and postproduction boutique located in Culver City, Calif., that has done work for national advertising clients as well as television networks and studios including Fox Sports, G4, CBS/Paramount, and NBC Universal, as well as a recent project for Fuel TV highlighting the contemporary art duo the Clayton Brothers. For more on Salt, visit its Reel-Exchange profile.

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What helped formulate the concept of the Clayton Brothers Signature Series piece? What technology/tools did Salt use to put its art in motion?

Douglass: More than a few meetings were arranged to discuss what this thing could be. ... We finally zeroed in on the concept that all the characters in the piece are either searching for, finding, or have found their individual version of bliss. Some find bliss in a relationship. Others may find bliss in playing a musical instrument. In this piece, the bird flying around is looking for a skateboard. Can birds skate? Yes, they can.

We started extracting the layers in [Adobe] Photoshop. The files were huge! Not only did we have to cut out every character, tree, object in the works, but we had to create what was never painted to make the characters move. It wasn''t a particularly complicated process, but tedious as h-e-double-hockey-sticks—especially because we were trying to maintain the texture of the original paint and canvas, matching the Clayton Brothers'' style of painting. While we were Photoshopping, Rob and Christian [the Clayton Brothers] were back at their studio, painting custom elements, backgrounds, clouds, and trees.

Read the rest of Douglass's Q&A at reel-exchange.com/insider/ian_douglass.

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