Tal Rosner

Tal Rosner’s background is in Graphic design. When studying for his BA degree, he concentrated on magazine and poster graphics. He then completed a Masters in Moving Image at St. Martins, in order to “translate what I learned in Graphics into animation”. He has since taught himself to use Adobe After Effects. After finishing his education, Rosner took a job in post production, but did not enjoy it; preferring instead to concentrate on small projects where he could have full artistic control. He cites the biggest influence on his work as being art between 1905 and 1935, making particular reference to the Bauhaus and a poem by Josef Albers:

Calm down,
what happens,
happens mostly
without you.

The first piece he showed us was an animation to classical piano music called Doppelganger. It was all produced digitally, beginning with footage from a camera placed on the front of a train. He uses a split screen, representing the two piano parts. I really loved this piece, particularly the abstraction of the journey, and the Kaleidoscope style moving patterns it eventually became. I thought his sense of rhythm is excellent, and fitted in very well with the movement of a train. He then showed us five short pieces put to classical music by Stavinsky. They were created in a similar way – he chose a building, filmed it, and deconstructed it into individual parts for the animation. He mentioned that he films around London for inspiration.

Rosners best known job to date was the title sequence for the series ‘Skins’, for which he won a BAFTA award, and is currently working on the third season. I was particularly impressed with his attention to detail within this piece, and the fact that he produced 72 different versions before choosing the final edit.

Rosner was recently commissioned by the London symphony orchestra to produce visuals to be played at a live performance. It was based around the seven days of creation, but from a non – religious point of view. In much the same way as his earlier work, all the filming was done inside the orchestra hall and then abstracted; light fittings were, for example used as stars, and scaffolding eventually became trees. This level of creativity really inspires me.

Overall, I was very impressed by Rosners’ work, particularly the Doppelganger piece, and although his animations are not directly relevant to my own work, I found the idea of taking something as mundane as train travel, and abstracting it until it becomes a fascinating, Kaleidoscope pattern very interesting.