Jan 24, 2011 Art of the Title Comments (7)
Quantum of Solace
"It's time to get out." - James Bond
What stifles creativity? Tedious third party rudeness, fear of appearing the fool, fear of failure (stigmatizing mistakes), fear of authority, fear of bucking the team or the trend?
MK12, the title and motion graphic designers for director Marc Forster's 2008 entry in the James Bond franchise, Quantum of Solace, englobes 007 with women in the dunes and the persistence of arid visions; a zoetrope in free fall and sandy contrails of a bullet on its way. Taking the title design reins from names like Binder, Brownjohn, and Kleinman, MK12 – billing itself as a "full-service lateral hyperthreaded tactical design and research bureau" – seems to have attained a self-fulfilling creative kinship that flies in the face of what author Bruce Sterling describes as the flux of "Hollywood film ad-hocracies."
To make a movie, Sterling says:
You're pitchforking a bunch of freelancers together, exposing some film, using the movie as the billboard to sell the ancillary rights, and after the thing gets slotted to video, everybody just vanishes.
To take the idea further, Joel Kotkin, author of a landmark 1995 article in Inc. magazine entitled, "Why Every Business Will Be Like Show Business," writes:
Hollywood has mutated from an industry of classic huge, vertically integrated corporations into the world's best example of a network economy. Eventually, every knowledge-intensive industry will end up in the same flattened, atomized state. Hollywood just has gotten there first.
Ben Radatz, MK12 creative director is part of something different:
The studio as an entity is definitely greater than the sum of its parts. It's casual, because everyone is unpretentious, anti-hierarchical and open-minded. Yet it's also personal, because I believe most of us are introverts. And more importantly, we are all friends first.
So MK12 is a collective that capitalizes on true collaborative creativity realized (or not) by and with the hands of friends. Why is this alternative not the well-practiced norm from the damn beginning? What progressive, Vandermeerish planes of warped Gothicism would we be exploring? Even as we take solace in the knowledge that we will have a crack at it in this lifetime, the underbelly's nibblet tugs are ever-feeding with the awareness that we might've been there sooner.