Howard Nourmand: Analyze This
Maximum Morph and Magic Tricks
After perfecting his inkblots, Nourmand scanned them into his Mac and imported the files into Illustrator, where he turned them into vector images that would remain sharp at any size and resolution. “We broke the black parts and the white gaps into a bunch of shapes,” he explains. “This was our way of ensuring that we could maximize our morph — all the position, scale and rotation changes — and independently control every component.”
The hands in the title sequence are his own, and what looks like video is in fact stop-motion animation. “I wanted the hands to look very dramatic, like a magician doing tricks in a film noir tone,” notes Nourmand. He sealed off the windows and skylights to better control the directional lighting in a pitch-black room. “I found these rickety old stage lights in the basement of the historic Hollywood Athletic Club, so the whole process reeked of Old Hollywood.”
Nourmand set up his Canon D80 on a tripod and had his assistant, Eileen Bertumen, shoot his hands in high-res as he made tiny, incremental movements. Each two-second bit of animation consists of about 100 stills, culled from thousands. Nourmand imported the photos into Aperture, where he arranged them in sequences, then exported them to After Effects for animation.
Like Cutting Butter
Nourmand remembers when he first learned to use Final Cut Pro. “I never had a book or a manual,” he says. “I can’t think of an application that’s more intuitive. Final Cut Pro taught itself to me. It made editing like cutting butter with a hot knife.”
The software was crucial to his title sequence for “The Dog Problem.” He used it to edit live action segments, to change the pace of animated sequences exported from other applications, and to sync visuals to audio. “I don’t know how we would have done that without Final Cut Pro,” he says. “We had to nail all the right beats, the high hats, the accents, slowing down or speeding up the video so the music would match it. Final Cut Pro is the best platform to do that.”
He depended on QuickTime Pro to email clips to his colleagues and get instant feedback. “It’s amazing,” says Nourmand. “You don’t even have to open an application. I’d export a clip, compress it in QuickTime Pro, then file transfer it through iChat — we always had cameras and live chats going. Or I’d be watching a clip and I’d say, ‘I want to move that part.’ You can just cut it here and put it there — bing badda bang, it’s instant gratification.”
Nourmand mock-moans: “Apple is spoiling this generation of designers. It’s the genius tool — all you need to supply is the idea.”
Like Creepy, Obscure Hitchcock
Nourmand’s passion for his project sustained him in the face of long days on an ultra-low budget. “When people hire me to design a logo, it takes about a month,” he explains. “Here, I was designing an image that’s iconic, like a logo — and that also transforms into another image that happens to be an inkblot. That’s a big design challenge to do once, then there are 33 of them. And we had no money. But,” he adds cheerily, “I believe in it so much!”
Nourmand likes the way his title sequence brings to life a vintage aesthetic using the latest tools. “I deliberately avoided a computer sensibility,” he comments. “I didn’t want anything that looked too technical, too digital, too slick. I wanted the movements to feel retro and old-timey, like some creepy obscure thing Hitchcock might have done — or like those experimental animated films that were crudely drawn and roughly executed. It was my way of paying homage to innovators like Jan Svankmajer, Brothers Quay and Maya Deren.”
At the same time, he acknowledges, “it’s a project that could only be done now. If you tried to do this before, the computers would have crashed. It uses all the newest technology Apple has to offer, and it all came together on the Mac.”
Cautions Nourmand, “I’m not some techie geek. We didn’t do any programming. This was all right out of the box. There are so many ways to use the Mac and the applications — it’s limitless.”
