Catching Up // AUGUST: 2011

I am going to attempt to play catch up and keep it snappy. Back in August our crew (Sam & myself + our Director of Photography Travis Auclair) traveled East to do a number of interviews.

After landing in NY and driving up to Boston we met up with Josh Luke of Best Dressed Signs who was finishing up work on a tattoo shop window in Cambridge.



The next day we were able to meet up with James "Spike" Birmingham, Rich Thuillier and John Butera of the Butera School of Art Sign Department. We discussed the recently shut-down program (currently in its last semester after being recently bought out by Fisher College) and it's impact it's had on the Sign Writing community after 100 years of teaching lettering.



After our time at Butera we drove 6 hours back to New York for the night,  then up early for a 2 hour jaunt to Deleware to meet with the gentelman of House Industries [Ken Barber, Andrew Cruz and Rich Roat] to discuss the roll of hand-lettering within the development of type & fonts, their love of letters and the roll sign painters have played in their business.


Back in New York we got a chance to spend a quite a chunk of time with the Colossal Media's Sky High Crew. Owners Paul Lindahl & Adrian Moeller gave us a rundown of how the business is run, jobs are executed and how the shop is structured. The breakdown of responsibility within the company as far as interns starting ground up with pattern making, mixing paint and then after a few years, if ready, get to rig a job and paint to a job manager who runs the show on site.

The amount of room needed to store all the equipment is significant. We were also allowed us to go on the set-up for two jobs, and watching them haul everything up flights of stairs and manually up the sides of the buildings I personally now have a real understanding of what goes into the large wall jobs and am excited we will be able to show the public how this is done in the documentary.






 

While Sam & Travis were shooting with the Sky High crew in Soho I ran by Steve Powers studio to shoot some stills. He was working on some pieces for an upcoming exhibit in Italy but also had time to show me sketches and tell me about a large scale project about to be painted in Brooklyn that you can now see completed here & read about in the New Yorker here.



We had a few more folks lined up that we were going to try to hook up with but due to Hurricane Irene we had to make some schedule adjustments- that also included us being trapped in the city much longer then expected.