By SANDRA GARCIA
Bicoastal shop The End has signed Los Angeles-based director Earle Sebastian for music videos and commercials. Sebastian was formerly represented by bicoastal HSI Productions and is currently handled in the U.K. by Serious Pictures, London.
While Sebastian’s background is mainly in music videos, The End is also looking to diversify him into spots. "I’ve joined The End mainly to get into commercials, but will do music videos as well," explained Sebastian.
Born in South Africa and raised in Britain, Sebastian started his career as a DJ in London and soon after began directing music videos for bands like The Young Disciples and Jamiroquai. He also shot a series of videos to accompany the album, Red Hot and Dance, one in a series of LPs recorded for the Red Hot Organization, which promotes HIV/AIDS research.
Sebastian moved to New York in the early ’90s and opened his own production company called Good Karma. There he most notably shot a long form jazz documentary for the Red Hot Organization, called Stolen Moments: Red Hot + Cool, which featured jazz legends collaborating with hip-hop artists. He also produced two accompanying albums, Red Hot On Impulse and Stolen Moments: Red Hot + Cool.
Based on his music documentary work, Motown Records asked Sebastian to direct several music videos as part of a television tribute to Marvin Gaye called Inner City Blues: The Music of Marvin Gaye. Sebastian shot artists such as Madonna, with Massive Attack, Bono, Stevie Wonder, and Neneh Cherry singing covers of Gaye’s songs.
After five years in New York, Sebastian closed Good Karma’s doors and moved to Los Angeles to join Oil Factory Films, Hollywood, as a music video director where he shot videos for Tori Amos, Simply Red and Missy Elliott. He left after one year to join HSI Productions, where he served for eight months.
Tim Burton Discusses His Dread Of AI As An Exhibition of His Work Opens In London
The imagination of Tim Burton has produced ghosts and ghouls, Martians, monsters and misfits — all on display at an exhibition that is opening in London just in time for Halloween.
But you know what really scares him? Artificial intelligence.
Burton said Wednesday that seeing a website that had used AI to blend his drawings with Disney characters "really disturbed me."
"It wasn't an intellectual thought — it was just an internal, visceral feeling," Burton told reporters during a preview of "The World of Tim Burton" exhibition at London's Design Museum. "I looked at those things and I thought, 'Some of these are pretty good.' … (But) it gave me a weird sort of scary feeling inside."
Burton said he thinks AI is unstoppable, because "once you can do it, people will do it." But he scoffed when asked if he'd use the technology in this work.
"To take over the world?" he laughed.
The exhibition reveals Burton to be an analogue artist, who started off as a child in the 1960s experimenting with paints and colored pencils in his suburban Californian home.
"I wasn't, early on, a very verbal person," Burton said. "Drawing was a way of expressing myself."
Decades later, after films including "Edward Scissorhands," "Batman," "The Nightmare Before Christmas" and "Beetlejuice," his ideas still begin with drawing. The exhibition includes 600 items from movie studio collections and Burton's personal archive, and traces those ideas as they advance from sketches through collaboration with set, production and costume designers on the way to the big screen.
London is the exhibition's final stop on a decade-long tour of 14 cities in 11 countries. It has been reconfigured and expanded with 90 new objects for its run in... Read More