Features

From film festivals to your phone screen, the press clips featuring SVA community members in this edition of “The Five” cover topics as wide-ranging as French cinema, web and television series, music videos and scammers. 

1. Rebecca Sugar (BFA 2009 Animation), creator of the beloved series Steven Universe, chronicles the most challenging “cry” she’s ever animated for “Weep Week,” Vulture’s series about crying in TV and film. Sugar is one of a handful of featured animators who speaks to the complexities of capturing emotion in cartoons and the amount of care needed to execute it flawlessly. “You’re faced with a choice: Do we take out the snot so that we don’t have to create a unique design just to streamline production?” Sugar says. “And more often than not, I would say, ‘No, I want to honor the snot.’”

2. In the Portland Press Herald, Maine native Matt Enos (BFA 2012 Film) talks about expanding his long-running web series The Slim Duffy Show to film for his debut feature Battle Legends: The Legend of the Battle Master, an homage to classic kung-fu cinema. Thanks to a slightly unconventional marketing strategy—a limited release of Blu-rays distributed by SRS Releasing—Enos’s wacky characters (played mostly by himself) are reaching a wider audience, taking what started as a fun collaboration with a bunch of friends to the next level. Described as “inventive, inappropriate, funny and gross,” The Slim Duffy Show can be found on YouTube.

3. In addition to her multiple covers for The New Yorker over the past few years, Nicole Rifkin (MFA 2017 Illustration as Visual Essay) has produced impressive illustrations to accompany pieces in The Cut and The New York Times this week. For the former, Rifkin’s collage-like pieces help tell the story of a financial columnist who gets scammed out of $50,000. In the latter, her illustration is paired with a review of a new memoir, Splinters, which explores author Leslie Jamison’s conflicting identities following her divorce.

4. Creative Boom spoke with independent designer and art director at Google YouTube Music Minkwan Kim (BFA 2020 Design) about his career thus far, which has included designs for Lil Nas X showcased at Radio City Music Hall. “I remember feeling a rush of excitement and disbelief as I looked up at the massive venue, especially since it was the same place where I had my graduation ceremony. Seeing my work on display in such an iconic location was incredibly rewarding and touching,” he says. In the interview, Kim covers everything from his earliest forays into typography to the album covers he created for himself as a teenager, inspired by the old-school iPod album cover flow, to the future of AI in design.

5. As part of the 29th edition of Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, a partnership between Film at Lincoln Center and Unifrance, third-year BFA Film student Ferman Victor Siasat has been selected as one of six students to make up the Best Emerging Filmmaker Student Jury. At next month’s festival, Siasat and his fellow jurors will help decide the winning emerging filmmaker bringing their unique perspective to “France’s new and diverse identities.”