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REFRESHING OBJECTIVITY

Travel Chronicles is an editorial feature for wejetset’s online magazine. Through an open and casual conversation it highlights how travel has shaped the talents, perspectives and experiences of creative and business professionals worldwide. This edition features Eric Weiss.

Filmmaker and designer, Eric Weiss has had the following job titles: designer, art director, writer, creative director, editor-at-large, production designer, filmmaker, and director. He spent a couple years in advertising and editorial, a couple years touring with and filming different bands, and is now making short and feature length films, videos, and commercials. These intriguing assignments have allowed him to travel the world and see things and places that, as he bluntly puts it, “slowly polished away the anger of my youth.” We sat down with him at the studio of Smyrski Creative to talk about how travel has changed his perspective as a designer and filmmaker. Click Read More for the full interview.

Design in general is all interrelated. It’s communication. I kind of see everything as a layout to begin with. I used to work in magazines, you are doing a layout and it was this progression of a story. As I moved into film I saw it as the same thing, just trying to get a point across, to get a story. That became the objective, instead of one photo it became twenty-four frames of photos. I’ve always felt like an observer anyway. I don’t know if that’s just a way of saying I’m passive aggressive but I’ve always felt like I’ve just been looking at things. I’ve been really fortunate to find myself in a lot of situations throughout the years. I’ve gotten to travel a ton and witness things firsthand that border on ludicrous I would think. For example, ending up in Bahrain and a day later I’m having dinner with Michael Jackson on a private jet. Those kinds of things are a little weird. Weird no matter where you are.

I did what a lot of kids do. I went to college and got the grab bag education of a Liberal Arts degree. Looking back, I probably could have used a little more direction. I think it’s like when you get a six-pack of assorted beers and you just have one of each and you’re like “ah, that was good, maybe I should keep going.” But by then you’re $40,000 in the hole. I was set out to do this kind of middle-management life. I was fortunate enough to get stopped in my tracks and realized that I’d always liked painting and I’d always liked drawing.

I took an internship with a design firm for five bucks an hour and it just blew my mind that you could do all this stuff . This was the early nineties when the Mac was really taking control of design and everyone was going from pasteups and stencil to desktop publishing and design. I was so amazed by this world. My first design job was designing credit cards and my first project was a cat enthusiast credit card. It was awesome. I worked with a photographer and I had to do a photo shoot with kittens. I learned all about the different types of cats; we had different yarns, it was really amazing. I had to cast the cats. The people from the bank, they were giving me the demographics, the people they were trying to target market, saying “We are aiming for cat enthusiasts. Be careful, don’t confuse that with cat fanciers”. We had some trouble with tabby cats but all in all it was good. You’ll talk to some designers and the first thing they ever designed was a flier for some obscure punk band who went on to be well known. My first job was a cat enthusiast credit card! I just saw what I could do. I saw the power of an image. And the fact that that thought derived from doing a cat credit card is amazing.

When I had my own design company I was my own boss. But I still had a mug that said ‘My boss is a prick’. When you’re your own boss it kind of sucks, you get no one to complain to. You’re at fault all the time. It ran me ragged but it was a learning experience.

Everything I did was another step towards film. I always thought film was magical and movies were amazing in what they could do and where they could take you. You sat there and you watched these things and I was always amazed at how someone could think like that. How someone could put their dreams and stories on film because it’s such a process and it’s so amazing. You don’t just walk in with a camera and that’s it, it’s years of your life and I was just so amazed by that. And that attracted to me to go from design into film. I said “I could do this.”

I’ve been to Ghana three times on different jobs. The first time I went there I went to an arts market. I always had seen these movie posters that are really famous in Ghana, they’re hand painted movie posters. People take rice sacks and they sew them together and paint these lavish, amazing movie posters. For the smaller villages that don’t have a movie theater they play movies on a VCR instead, and it’s usually a movie that’s been out ten years or something, an action movie. The artists probably have never seen the movie so they just take what they can from the box cover or what they’ve heard to make the poster, so there are these amazing interpretations of what these movies are. They’re pretty violent and pretty awesome. I purchased a couple of posters from this guy in a market. One of them I think was Jean Claude Van Damme with an explosion and tanks and stuff. It’s in my living room.

I went back to Ghana three years later and I’m walking in the market and the same guy sees me and says “Eric I have more posters!”. “Cool” I said, “I’m staying at this hotel and instead of me standing looking at all this stuff come to the hotel and I’ll check them out.” I figure he’s not going to come. That night in the hotel, the front desk rings and says there’s a man there for me. I come downstairs and the movie poster guy is there and he says “I brought you some posters”. We go outside and he has hundreds of these posters all out in the courtyard. They’re not small, they’re roughly three feet by six feet. So the entire courtyard of the hotel is covered in this amazing blanket of amazingly painted movie posters for movies that I would probably never admit I’ve seen. Like Child’s Play 3 and Phantasm 2. They’re awesome and it blew my mind but then it scared the crap out of me because I didn’t have any money. I felt so bad. I borrowed some cash and I bought a couple posters. Child’s Play, some Indian flick and King Kong. It was cool.