“Beauty is truth, truth beauty” wrote English poet John Keats in 1819. “That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” For creative directors Hazel Baird and Heidi Berg, however, Keats’s eternal chiasmus is incomplete; their truth is so much more. In their opening to Semi-Permanent Sydney 2019, Truth is a savior and a shadow, a creator and a cannibal, a phantasmagoria pieced together by a wide-ranging crew and bursting with darkness, colour, and inspiration.
In 2018, when creative director Joyce N. Ho emailed Semi-Permanent organizer Murray Bell to inquire about the opening titles for the well-known festival, it seemed like a shot in the dark. But it was also a bellwether, a sign of things to come. Ho’s titles were a smashing success. She also became the first woman in the festival’s nearly 20-year history to helm its opening titles. Fast forward one year and another gorgeous opening for Semi-Permanent has emerged—and with a similar genesis.
The shape-shifting, media-melding titles for the 2019 edition of the festival come care of Baird, Berg, a team of animators and designers at LA-based studio Elastic (Game of Thrones, True Detective, Westworld), and several far-flung collaborators. After reading about the process behind the 2018 titles and learning that Ho had thrown her own hat into the ring, Elastic design director Hazel Baird decided to do the same. Baird reached out to Bell and landed the gig. What came next is eight months of rigorous after-hours work, a host of stops and starts, soul-searching and soundscaping, cel animating and CGI, and, eventually, a stunning piece of motion design. The finished product brings together a wide range of influences, stirring together body horror and Greek myth, grim sculptural forms and noisy, saturated illustrations. It is a testament to the importance of knowledge sharing, the beauty of collaboration, and the power of asking for what you want. Sometimes, the most vital step to achieving a goal is having the courage to ask.
A discussion with Creative Directors HAZEL BAIRD and HEIDI BERG.
First, congratulations on this piece! Tell me a little about how this project started.
Hazel: I emailed Murray around November of [2018] to ask if he wanted to do the titles with Elastic and he was really happy about it and excited. I’ve been here at Elastic for a couple of years and I got to know Heidi quite well. I didn’t want to do it on my own. I thought we would do a good job together so I asked her to help out.
Heidi: Hazel sent me a…
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