Jason Polan: The Art of Texas Law

I don’t remember how I stumbled across it, but The 20×200 Blog is a fascinating showcase for a wide variety of artists. If you like what you see, you can buy the artwork for a fixed price of $20, $200, or $2,000, depending on the size of the piece. Anyway, one of the posts that caught my eye dealt with a video featuring Jason Polan, a freelance artist from New York City who also happens to be a member, presumably in good standing, of the Taco Bell Drawing Club, and whose current project is to draw every person in NYC. He also paints big ants, thereby endearing himself to this blog.

The video that’s the subject of the 20×200 post was commissioned by the State Bar of Texas, and it’s a very good primer on the importance of the separation of powers among the three branches of government. Here ’tis, courtesy of YouTube:

That’s Jason’s actual arm doing the sketching in the video. I thought it was a great piece of work, and quite effective in communicating basic concepts in an appealing fashion. (I’m a sucker for ads that incorporate drawing; the current UPS “whiteboard” series of TV commercials comes to mind.) My curiosity was also piqued by the pairing of a New York artist with the Texas Bar, and I wanted to know more about the project. I couldn’t find anything online so I took the unprecedented blogging step of doing some actual research, thereby avoiding my usual tactic of just making something up. I emailed Jason with some questions, and he very graciously carved out the time to answer them. Here’s the transcript.

NYC is pretty far from Austin. How did you and the State Bar hook up with one another?

Jason: I think a producer at the group that was in charge of making the films had seen a film I made with a friend, Meredith Zielke, called How To Draw A Giraffe on the Wholphin Website and contacted me.

Where were the videos shot?

Jason: Atlanta

Each video looks pretty clean, almost as if each was created from a single uninterrupted shot. Was that indeed the case? If so, how many takes were required to get the final version of each?

Jason: Yea, each one had to be done with one shot. The editors changed speeds on some parts (you can notice it at the end of each film because I was writing too slow) but each one was done in one shot. They took three or four full attempts at each. A couple of times I would stop because I messed something up or there were a couple cases of going through the whole script and then people deciding something needed to be reworked. While I was doing it I was nervous but I was happy with the direction and I think they came out well.

Apart from doing the drawing, what was your role in the creation of the stories? Did you have input to the scripts?

Jason: Scripts were completed before I did the drawings so I was completely out of the equation for their production, but as we figured out timing with the drawings we realized that some things in the script could be reworked. I gravitated toward visual things and parts of the script were not very visual – things needed to be educational the whole way through so we hopefully found a balance.

Did you also narrate the videos?

Jason: Nope.

What was the biggest challenge you faced in this project?

Jason: I was fairly nervous the whole way through. I wanted to be producing visually stimulating things that were also learning tools. I needed to be producing them in the order presented at a particular timing. Things were altered a little with the pace changes but I was trying to avoid that where I could and make things easier for editors (and more pleasing for viewers).

You were no doubt perceptive enough to note that in a couple of places, I referred to videos. The separation of powers spot is one of a “Choose Well” series of three commissioned by the State Bar, and featuring Jason. The other two deal with judicial elections and serving on a jury. The State Bar should be commended for using such a creative approach to education.

I also want to again thank Jason Polan for taking the time to give us a behind-the-scenes look at the project.