{"id":439,"date":"2008-09-25T15:55:39","date_gmt":"2008-09-25T20:55:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/gazette\/2008\/09\/25\/080925_jasonpolan\/"},"modified":"2022-03-11T12:57:21","modified_gmt":"2022-03-11T18:57:21","slug":"080925_jasonpolan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/2008\/09\/25\/080925_jasonpolan\/","title":{"rendered":"Jason Polan: The Art of Texas Law"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I don&#8217;t remember how I stumbled across it, but <a href=\"http:\/\/20x200.com\/blog\/\">The 20&#215;200 Blog<\/a> 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 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jasonpolan.com\/\">Jason Polan<\/a>, a freelance artist from New York City who also happens to be a member, presumably in good standing, of the <a title=\"The Official TBDC blog\" href=\"http:\/\/drawingattacobell.blogspot.com\/\">Taco Bell Drawing Club<\/a>, and whose current project is to <a title=\"The Official Every Person in New York blog\" href=\"http:\/\/everypersoninnewyork.blogspot.com\/\">draw every person in NYC<\/a>. He also <a title=\"\" href=\"http:\/\/www.jasonpolan.com\/art\/mural\/bigant45.jpg\" data-rel=\"lightbox-image-0\" data-rl_title=\"\" data-rl_caption=\"\">paints big ants<\/a>, thereby endearing himself to this blog.<\/p>\n<p>The video that&#8217;s the subject of <a href=\"http:\/\/20x200.com\/blog\/2008\/09\/jason-polan-video-on-separation-of-powers.html\">the 20&#215;200 post<\/a> was commissioned by the State Bar of Texas, and it&#8217;s a very good primer on the importance of the separation of powers among the three branches of government. Here &#8217;tis, courtesy of YouTube:<\/p>\n<div align=\"center\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/k5TdkYrcZCg\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/div>\n<p>That&#8217;s Jason&#8217;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&#8217;m a sucker for ads that incorporate drawing; the current UPS &#8220;whiteboard&#8221; 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&#8217;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&#8217;s the transcript.<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/images\/fireant\/divider1.gif\" alt=\"Divider\" width=\"108\" height=\"15\" border=\"0\" vspace=\"8\" \/><\/p>\n<p><em>NYC is pretty far from Austin. How did you and the State Bar hook up with one another?<\/em><\/p>\n<p><strong>Jason<\/strong>: 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 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wholphindvd.com\/web-films\/how-to-draw-a-giraffe\/\">Wholphin Website<\/a> and contacted me.<\/p>\n<p><em>Where were the videos shot?<\/em><\/p>\n<p><strong>Jason<\/strong>: Atlanta<\/p>\n<p><em>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?<\/em><\/p>\n<p><strong>Jason<\/strong>: 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.<\/p>\n<p><em>Apart from doing the drawing, what was your role in the creation of the stories? Did you have input to the scripts?<\/em><\/p>\n<p><strong>Jason<\/strong>: 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 &#8211; things needed to be educational the whole way through so we hopefully found a balance.<\/p>\n<p><em>Did you also narrate the videos?<\/em><\/p>\n<p><strong>Jason<\/strong>: Nope.<\/p>\n<p><em>What was the biggest challenge you faced in this project?<\/em><\/p>\n<p><strong>Jason<\/strong>: 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).<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/images\/fireant\/divider1.gif\" alt=\"Divider\" width=\"108\" height=\"15\" border=\"0\" vspace=\"8\" \/><\/p>\n<p>You were no doubt perceptive enough to note that in a couple of places, I referred to <em>videos<\/em>. The separation of powers spot is one of a &#8220;Choose Well&#8221; series of three commissioned by the State Bar, and featuring Jason. The other two deal with <a title=\"YouTube\" href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=3_vNwQ-i0fA\">judicial elections<\/a> and <a title=\"YouTube\" href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=Ea28nYnurQ8\">serving on a jury<\/a>. The State Bar should be commended for using such a creative approach to education.<\/p>\n<p>I also want to again thank Jason Polan for taking the time to give us a behind-the-scenes look at the project.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I don&#8217;t remember how I stumbled across it, but The 20&#215;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&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/2008\/09\/25\/080925_jasonpolan\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Jason Polan: The Art of Texas Law<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[38,35,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-439","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-advertising","category-art","category-society-culture","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/439","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=439"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/439\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8549,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/439\/revisions\/8549"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}