Pub: Do you consider what you do to be graphic design?

GM: Yes. I think from the start I have always had a very broad idea of what graphic design was. For me, calling most everything i do graphic design has helped me focus on doing whatever I want. I use a design process I learnt at Cal Arts and apply it to whatever I am doing, so in some ways there is a design-ness to everything I approach. Maybe I just use the respectable guise of graphic design to justify what I do as it serves me?

Pub: How has your education in graphic design affected your work as a director?

GM: The real question might be: How has my lack of a film education affected me as a director?

I guess I answered that question a little in the first question. I think that being a designer has affected my directing most clearly in the conceptualizing of projects, the writing of ideas, and storyboards. Often it is graphics in that help me push the projects along. In film I believe that the details really add up, which is similar to graphics. AND often in my film work the details are actual graphics. I am very comfortable with the writing and conceptual part of film projects, but often feel that if someone else did the actually directing the projects would turn out better. Working as GD the way I do (by myself) has made it difficult for me to adapt to the collaboration of filmmaking. I am not a big fan of the Set, I am much more comfortable in a studio in a sort of solitary mode. At the same time, collaboration, and the elaborate process of film making can be quite magical. Being magical with graphics is difficult.

I have created an ideal practice for myself as a designer, and so my goal is to create an ideal practice for myself as a film maker/ animator as well.

Pub: What do you think about the the use of design and typography in motion work today?

GM: I rarely see anything that interests me. I am at the point now that when I do a motion graphics project I find myself making things that barely move. At that point what is it. Digital still graphics? Frame based design?

Pub: What are the forces that shape trends in motion design and how will these forces affect its future?

GM: Much of graphic design is driven by the needs of corporate culture to "revoice" the language of excitement. Motion graphics is no different. If you see something independently produced, it is not long before it is mimiced on VH1 or one-upped in a car commercial. Motion graphics seems to always be reinventing itself at its own expense. A change took place when technology became more important in producing the increasingly complex animation.
It feels like how everybody I know seems to understand that big budget digital special effects look like crap, but Hollywood just can't stop at this point.
When I first started in design this sort of thing was going on with designers running layers of flourescent ink and blind embossing things. Now you see car commercials where a doodle turns into a flock of doves or something. But would you watch any of these things on Utube? I wouldn't. I am busy watching videos of the 1986 Tour de France.
The designers that in the were layering the flourescent inks just sort of stopped doing it, and returned to the ordinary concerns of doing design, and making good, cool stuff.