By BENJAMIN S. MALKIN
Editorial boutique embraces clips and spots.
When Chris Hafner, co-owner/head creative at Brass Knuckles, Venice, Calif., began taking film and video courses at Palmar College, San Diego, he could not have foreseen how quickly he’d be in the ring with the heavyweights of postproduction. During his first year of studies, one of his assignments was to create six public service announcements about the local fire department. The PSAs earned six nominations for regional Emmy awards, and Hafner won two for directing ("Drugs Won’t Make You Cool" and "Your Last Bag"). He then transferred to New York University’s Tisch School Of The Arts, and directed music videos on the side. "But [I was] always editing, always cut my own stuff," Hafner says.
Hafner’s college internship with editor Judy Minot at RVI Editorial, New York, led to his meeting Jeff Brian, an in-house director for Sony, who enlisted him to help edit a longform home video for Ozzy Osbourne. While traveling with Osbourne’s band, Hafner impressed the tour’s opening act, Prong, who asked him to direct a longform video for them. "I was still in school," says Hafner, who also cut the project. "I just kept getting freelance calls. I had no plans to move to California, but I kept working and working and working. I called my roommate at college and said ‘I just bought a car. I’ve moved; send my stuff.’"
For two years, Hafner worked as a freelance director and editor until he and his former college roommate, Doug Johnson, pooled their savings to buy an Avid 400, rent an office, and set up their own shop in West Hollywood. That small operation was the beginning of Brass Knuckles, which today counts among its clients the Gap, Mazda, Budweiser, McDonald’s, Disney, Kids Footlocker and Snickers.
As Brass Knuckles expanded, one of Hafner’s editors, Scott Canning, introduced him to Greg Laube, who is now Brass Knuckles’ CEO, as well as president of the Los Angeles chapter of the Association of Independent Commercial Editors (AICE), and VP of the national AICE (SHOOT, 11/12/99, p.1).
In ’80, Laube opened Laube-Roth & Associates with Roger Roth. Upon Roth’s retirement in ’97, the company name was changed to X-Stream Post, and it merged with Brass Knuckles in ’98. "Brass Knuckles was just skyrocketing. I bought out Doug Johnson, and we merged [X-Stream Post] into Brass Knuckles. Then we moved over to Venice," says Hafner.
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