Nathan Johnson - Official Page

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[nathanjohnson]

I had the pleasure of directing the amazing Tom Cullen & Tatiana Maslany in the new long-form video for All Directions by Son Lux. 

[nathanjohnson]

New music video I directed for Magik*Magik

[npr]

The Madness Behind Making The Lucius Video, 'Gone Insane'

The visually twisted video for the Lucius song "Gone Insane" took more than 20,000 photos and a week to shoot.

No one has ever accused Nathan Johnson of taking the easy way out. The film composer, designer and director has made a name for himself, in part, by producing videos and other creative projects that require a mind-numbing amount of monotonous drudgery to pull off, but result in something magical and one-of-a-kind.

His latest mind-blower is a visually twisted video for the Lucius song “Gone Insane,” a stop-motion film full of stunning effects and zero CGI. The whole thing, inspired by facial dysmorphia, was painstakingly pieced together over the course of a week using old-fashioned makeup, prosthetics and more than 20,000 photographs.

—> WATCH THE MAKING OF THE VIDEO HERE <—

[nathanjohnson]

NPR just released a behind-the-scenes clip about how we made the new Lucius video for Gone Insane! Check it out for a peek into the madness:)

[youtube]

Lucius will be the one’s who’ve gone insane.

[wearelucius]

My heart’s so heavy I’m gonna need your help.

[nathanjohnson]

Pleased to share the new video we made for Lucius’ amazing song, GONE INSANE

You can read a bit about the whole thing over at Pitchfork

[nathanjohnson]

A.V. Club ❤️

[nathanjohnson]

Hey friends, if you’re gonna be in Austin next week for SXSW, drop by, say hi, see the video, eat BBQ. Here’s when we’re screening.

See y’all there!

[themadeshop]

Our short animated film Change Is Everything will be screening at SxSW this year. If you haven’t seen it, it was just featured on Vimeo’s front page as a Staff Pick. So excited for this!

[themadeshop]

[nathanjohnson]

Blow-guns, audio triggers, fluorescent lights, and colored dust… 
Here’s a look at how we made the Son Lux album cover

[austinkleon]

Beautiful things grow out of shit. Nobody ever believes that. Everyone thinks that Beethoven had his string quartets completely in his head—they somehow appeared there and formed in his head—and all he had to do was write them down and they would be manifest to the world. But what I think is so interesting, and would really be a lesson that everybody should learn, is that things come out of nothing. Things evolve out of nothing. You know, the tiniest seed in the right situation turns into the most beautiful forest. And then the most promising seed in the wrong situation turns into nothing. I think this would be important for people to understand, because it gives people confidence in their own lives to know that’s how things work. If you walk around with the idea that there are some people who are so gifted—they have these wonderful things in their head but and you’re not one of them, you’re just sort of a normal person, you could never do anything like that—then you live a different kind of life. You could have another kind of life where you could say, well, I know that things come from nothing very much, start from unpromising beginnings, and I’m an unpromising beginning, and I could start something.

Brian Eno, Here Is What Is (cf. David Rakoff: “Writing starts off as shit.”)

[themadeshop]

Little, Brown and Company held a competition to redesign the cover of Infinite Jest to celebrate the 20th anniversary edition. There was no way The Made Shop wasn’t going to get in on that.

We called our design “THE YUSHITYU MIMETIC RESOLUTION CARTRIDGE”

If you haven’t read it yet, inside the story there is an actual film cartridge called ‘Infinite Jest’ that functions as a sort of “MacGuffin” around which all the stories unfold. It’s a piece of media so completely entertaining that it’s lethal — once you start watching it all you want to do is continue forever neglecting everything else.

Now 20 years later, the novel ‘Infinite Jest’ itself has ironically achieved an oddly similar sort of iconic cultural aura — as a novel, but also as a physical media object itself.

Our cover design makes physical the double-meaning of the title by literally tranforming the book itself into Wallace’s “Mimetic Resolution Cartridge” with the title hand-scrawled as if by the filmmaker James Incandenza himself. And then, of course, the media-tape winds itself into an infinite loop within the case — echoed as the infinity symbol on the back cover.

[damadesign]

nathanjohnson ’s new sound for The Echo Society featuring fauxfix was just released and ❤️ this photos of them wearing my hand-painted canvas dress /Nathan’s painted shirt during their performance at Vibiana.

Listen to their amazing live recordings Here: https://soundcloud.com/theechosociety/sets/bloom

Photos by Desirea Stott-Rodgers desireastill

[nathanjohnson]

Thanks to Amanda for the amazing costumes and Desirea for the moody pics!

[nathanjohnson]

Here's a brand new piece that Katie and I performed at the most recent Echo Society show in DTLA.

[nathanjohnson]

Thanks to Flux for inviting me to speak at the Hammer Museum about the Son Lux “Change is Everything” video. Such a great night!

Photo by Sarah Golonka

[themadeshop]

A few behind-the-scenes photos from our shoot a few months ago for Son Lux’s You Don’t Know Me music video, featuring Tatiana Maslany and Noah Segan.

I assume you’ve already seen it. Right? Right??