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30/01/09 / One Small Seed

One Small Seed – Issue 102

Look I’m Invisible!
Words Dylan Culhane

Balancing a burning passion to dominate the creative stratosphere with the patience and pragmatism to regard every step of the ascent as a welcome challenge, Conduit has prevailed as one of the country’s most innovative and hard-working film/animation/design/illustration/motion graphics collaboratives. Dylan Culhane met up with Conduit’s two central components and talked about all kinds of interesting stuff.

If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself: it’s a well-worn phrase, but nevertheless a truism we’re likely to hear more of as the trend towards creative holism gains currency. It’s an ideology that Marc Ziman and David Correia subscribe to in the execution of through-the-line production and design. From immaculate conceptual sketches to the mechanical dirty work of post-production, Conduit is just that – a channel through which these uncannily in sync designer-directors give expression to their extensive base of visual skills.

Graduating from the soup-kitchen of freelance illustration and design to the more lucrative world of commercial film-making and motion graphics, Marc and Dave maintain that hand-drawn imagery still forms the cornerstone of their creative endeavor.
“All our work starts out as heavily conceptualised stills – picture-perfect storyboards that we really try and craft into a coherent package,” explains Marc.

Here’s another humdinger that I like to live my life by – Fortune favours the brave. And yet again the Conduit lads are a case in point. Without much industry experience, they simply rented a room and spent a month hammering out a speculative motion graphics reel. It wasn’t long before the agencies came sniffing. How many bedroom upstarts can claim BMW as their debut client? (Hint: opposite of many). There’s no film/animation/design/illustration/motion graphics corporate ladder to speak of, so the numerous successes they’ve already tallied up have been the result of pure chutzpah – a brazen refusal to accept standardized approaches to an art form they believe in. The final results have earned the trust of agencies from Johannesburg to Tokyo. Rather than just delivering set-in-stone boards, the suits tend to respect Conduit’s vision and bring them in creatively from an early stage.

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. An oft-quoted rallying cry for optimism and endurance. When attempting to walk the tightrope between unfettered creativity and month-end malnutrition, most right-brainers regard the division as polarized into good and evil. Dave has a different take on their more traditional work:
“Commercial jobs are creative too. Plus we’ve learnt a lot of technique in the process, so when the time is right we can apply it to our own creative projects.”
“We approach every single project with the idea of pushing it as much as possible. It’s never a drag, only a challenge,” adds Marc.

Their disregard for any distinction between business and pleasure allows for a healthy cross-pollination of ideas developed with clients, and those cultivated as notebook doodles on the beach after work. Whether painting on a piece of scrap wood or grappling with the mathematics of an intensive 3-D composite, it all stems from the same unquenchable artistic impulse and feeds the love for what they do.

As our time together draws to an end and Marc and Dave outline their expansionist vision, a single white feather drifts in through the 6th floor window and settles on the parquet floor. At that moment, everything in the world seemed right.