The Official Website of Amanda Theiler

The amount of amazing work that I’ve seen in the past two weeks while trying to find a job is truly incredible. It’s the kind of work that’s so good it that it both inspires you, and makes you want to quit in defeat. I’ve never had the chance to try stop motion before, but I found this music video for “Oh Mandy” by The Spinto Band directed by Sean Donnelly, and I thought it was pretty great. It reminded me of some of the work done in Michel Gondry’s film “Science of Sleep”. Check it out HERE.

I recently stumbled across this viral video from action sports brand Quiksilver and thought it was pretty impressive. Nice greenscreen/compositing/motion graphics work! You’ll have to wait until it gets about 20 seconds in for it to get really good. Check it out HERE.

I’ve recently begun work on a Bradley Theatre production of George Orwell’s “1984″. I’m working as the Multimedia Creative Director/Producer and I’m getting excited about it! We’re trying to update the feel of the play to make it seem a little bit more modern, and I’ve been looking in various places for inspiration. Some of the things I’ve been looking at are the art work of Shephard Fairey and the music of Nine Inch Nails.

Shephard Fairey has been known for quite some time in the art and skateboarding world for his Obey Giant campaign, which uses a propaganda style inspired heavily by 1984. During the past year he became famous for creating the iconic “Hope” image of Obama, which was reprinted on just about every surface and material imaginable during the election.

Nine Inch Nails’ highly under appreciated album “Year Zero”, which came out in 2007, was based on a dystopian culture similar to the one in 1984, although in this case, the year is 2022. It presents a dark picture of what NIN visionary Trent Reznor sees as the future of the world if the politics of today continue into the future. This was the last album NIN produced before splitting from Universal Music Group and making future releases (“Ghosts” and “The Slip”) available under Creative Commons licenses. Luckily for our sound design team, those CC licenses mean that we can use the music of those latter two albums in the production.

Keep checking back for more updates about filming as we continue working on the play. It will be performed only twice in Mid-April by Bradley Theatre’s Ministry of Experimental Theatre.

Ever since I got really into motion graphics creation sometime last summer, I’ve been looking at a lot of motion graphics to try to understand how they’re constructed, and I came across this title sequence for “The Poker Club” on Forget The Film, Watch The Titles. I really love the way it’s composited with so many layers and uses a card theme for the sequence.

Another title sequence that I also really enjoyed was this sequence for the film “Lucio”. I liked the fast pace and high energy through the piece as well as the way the type was dealt with. Type has always been one of the hardest things for me to incorporate into pieces, and I always like finding examples that I can use as inspiration to get me to think a little bit harder about how I use type in my own work.

This opening sequence for “Odyssey In Rome” is another that dealt with type in a new and creative way. As opposed to using graphics for the bulk of the sequence, there were few images used and it was very text heavy.

Hope you enjoyed these as much as I did! Check back later for more.

If there are two things in the world that make me happy, they are skateboarding and video editing. Which means that when the two are put together, I’m basically in heaven. I’ll admit that I really know nothing about skateboarding other than that I know that I really, really love it. I don’t know how to do it, and I really don’t understand what they’re doing, but it’s the most entertaining thing I’ve ever seen. So while I was going through my morning ritual of reading the Lat34 Action Sports Blog and noticed that there is a Skateboard Film Festival this summer in Seattle, I began to wonder if I could go to this and write it off as a business expense. According to their website, the festival will include “Workshops and informational discussions on editing and filmmaking”, as well as the chance to meet other film makers. If this isn’t a reasonable excuse to fly to Seattle to watch skate videos all day and then write it off as business, I don’t know what is.