ADC YOUNG GUNS

ADC Young Guns Live: Asif Mian
Posted on 2007-Nov-19 at 01:40
Young Asif seems to enjoy taking his background in traditional painting and drawing and applying modern design and graphic elements to make something new and unique.

He's intrigued by what he calls "conceptual" work. Speaking as an advertising copywriter, it's pretty interesting to see how an artist's artist like Asif portrays "conceptual" vs. how us ad folk usually think of the term. No singular visual puns here. His designs, while simple in concept (I think), are still deep, rich, and full of inspiration pulled from all kinds of sources. The piece below is an example of what he considers to be his conceptual work (Asif is on the right):

While his first love is drawing, like many artists, Asif can't seem to stay in one medium. Recently, Asif has ventured into the world of film - starting out by exploring his interest in stop motion. Below, check out a still from his stop motion piece that was inspired by a time when Asif woke up and felt as if his "jeans were alive." The piece started with a fully clothed man, and then his cloths slide off of him, form a body-with-no-body on the floor, and walk and dance... and finally jump back on the man.

While projects like these pretty much served Asif's personal wants and needs, it's gotten him pretty far professionally as well. Now he's not just doing fun stop motion projects for himself - but he has graduated to doing music videos for acts as prominent as The Roots. Still staying true to his transforming-the-classical-into-modern-twists theme, he based this Roots video, Pitfall, on a drawing he did. Here's the drawing and a still form the video. Can you see the relation?

Drawing:

Video:
Now don't go thinking that this art thing is complete freedom to do what you want. "They're still clients," Asif points out when talking about The Roots and their behemoth financiers Def Jam Records. We've all got to make a buck - including artists. And someone's gotta fit the bill. And that person usually has some specific wants and needs to be fulfilled before he signs his name on the dotted line.

Click here if you want to check out the rest of Asif's presentation. Its in quick time movie format, so just fast forward to view each piece at your own pace.

Christopher Lane just took the mic... back in 15 min.

B.