Rethink: Green

RETHINK: GREEN was a huge success! It was THE green event this season, a fundraiser to help spread the Green Ambassador program to schools nationwide. David de Rothschild, Lisa Ling, Ed Begley Jr., and The Buried Life Boys were all in attendance. Read press about the event from LA Examiner here.

I did the title design for the videos projected during the awards show, which honored notable environmental leaders such as Mark Gold (Heal the Bay), Jim Moriarty (Surfrider Foundation), Matt Petersen (Global Green), and many others.

Below are sketches of the titles.

The titles were also etched onto glass bottles that served as the Green Ambassador Award.

I am so happy to have been a part of this event. The teens are a real inspiration. Most of them are the first in their families to go to college. Jordan Howard and Rudy Sanchez, who I’ve worked with many times on local advocacy campaigns, are passionate and inspired speakers. This program has given them a platform for leadership and environmental stewardship, honoring the idea that each individual “be the change.”

I visited Environmental Charter High School for the first time when we shot the video. It was brimming with creativity and life. Every corner you turn, inspirational murals line the hallways. Colorful projects fill the classrooms. The campus is lined with gardens dubbed “live vending machines” — you can pick off a tomato for lunch — and a living stream winds through through the school. Imagine having a babbling brook fill in your thoughts between algebra and world history! This may be a given in some rural schools, but to find this in concretized Los Angeles is truly neat. I know this atmosphere motivates and nurtures achievement. I felt it just as a one-day visitor.

Follow Environmental Charter High School and see how these teens grow to be tomorrow’s agents of change.

Thanks to everyone who worked on RETHINK: GREEN, and a special thanks to Juli Schulz of Agents99 for bringing me on board.

CREDITS / Title Design and Production: Katherine Nguyen / Script: Lindsey Jurca, Jordan Howard, Rudy Sanchez / Video and Editing: Mark Bella

Green Ambassadors

What is a green ambassador?

Someone whose life is devoted in large part to healing the planet, and whose actions inspire others to do the same.

I’m working on a very exciting fundraiser for Environmental Charter Schools and the Green Ambassador program. Get your tickets for RETHINK GREEN now! It takes place this Saturday November 6 in Culver City. Enter code “FriendNFamily” for 30% off tickets.

Love This Planet site launches

I just launched a website featuring a brand video for Love This Planet, an eco-chic sustainable lifestyle brand with a product line that includes re-usable tote bags, glass bottles and jewelry. The inspiration for the video came from stop motion animation. With art direction and styling that recalls rock n’ roll bohemian chic, we took the production to Point Dume for a day of shooting — it couldn’t have been a more perfect California day! The site utilizes Flash 10 video encoding that allows for high-resolution streaming.

CREDITS / Concept, Photography, Site and Motion Design: Katherine Nguyen  / Models: Annalise Bryan, Lisa Leija, Brett Fleisher / Flash Development: Kirk Elliott / Music: Adam Malka / Writing: Jen Jones

Watching the detectives

Design processes vary according to designer and the demands of each project. Some processes are linear and predictable. Other processes are like detective work: Research, get clues, go down unknown paths to feel one’s way to the happy accident. The more technologies change, the more designers are required to do detective work as they design.

For the Acura ZDX site launches, I found myself doing exactly this.

The challenge: Provide photographic art direction for the vehicle and the 360 spin of the photographic backplates. The 360 spin served as the primary interactive experience of the Acura ZDX.

The backplates had to convey sophistication and design innovation in the ZDX. The vehicle is a hybrid: In form, it reflects the fluid, beautiful lines of nature. In performance, it bursts with the raw power of Acura engineering. To this end, I concepted a backplate scene that is exactly both: The beauty of nature and man in one panorama. The ZDX would sit on aloft on a hillside. In one direction is a glowing metropolis pulsing with human and machine life. In the other direction is a sunset-drenched view of the Pacific Ocean, nature at her most glorious.

For location scouting, I had a ball using Google Earth as a tool to get elevated views of Los Angeles. After that, I  found photos with approximations of those views and stitched them together to create the landscape that would serve as a backdrop for the car in the 360 spin.

For the scene’s foreground, I channeled architect DNA — my dad is an architect — to sketch the landscaping of the immediate foreground of the scene, sure to show shrubbery, driveway flooring and lighting details. These files were passed on to our backplate photographer and 3d renderers for production.

Of course, there was also the process of shooting the backplates in freezing rain at Griffith Observatory during a particularly cold winter day when what we really had in mind was splendid sunshine. Unexpected things will come up, but you roll with it and that’s all part of the process too. In the end, the rain that day gave us dramatic skies that worked better than what we had imagined.

Champion a detective mindset when you sit down to a design problem. Often it will give you the best, and most unexpected, results.