Jon Kletzien is principal at StudioAMD, a Providence-based architectural illustration firm that was the featured presenter at last week’s monthly Providence Geeks gathering. Kletzien talked with Providence Business News recently about what his firm is working on currently.
PBN: First, what exactly is an architectural illustration firm?
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KLETZIEN: It is a shop that specializes in making the presentation drawings for architects and developers when they are presenting a proposed project to the community, or potential tenants, etc. For smaller projects, architects typically will do their own drawings, but for major projects where consensus-building is key and there are a lot of stakeholders, going out to a professional illustrator can make a world of sense. Unfortunately, because we’re typically working on more substantially-sized projects, we’ve done very little work over the years in Rhode Island.
PBN: What makes StudioAMD different from other companies in the field?
KLETZIEN: Like any commercial art studio, the eyes of the artists here are different than elsewhere. In our case I would say we come much more from a painting and art history background, and we are striving to make images that strike an emotional chord, whereas most of our competitors strive to make images that look like photographs.
PBN: Over the years, StudioAMD has branched out beyond architectural illustration. What else do you work on now?
KLETZIEN: Well, our major source of revenue is still providing architects with images to fulfill their contracts with their clients. However, as more and more scrutiny surrounds almost every building, competition for building projects grows fiercer, and technological capabilities increase, the need for more compelling ways to present projects than still illustration is becoming apparent. To that end, films and custom Flash presentations are spheres we are currently working in, which are expensive, but for large projects, or master plans, almost de rigueur.
PBN: You demonstrated StudioAMD’s new “e-book” presentation tool for the first time at last week’s Providence Geeks dinner. Could you explain a little about what that is and what makes it useful?
KLETZIEN: It is the custom Flash presentation tool I alluded to above – so that is the underlying technology. Its potency and revolutionary quality, however, is the way it supports and interacts with the presenter or user.
We’ve all gone into a presentation with a simple linear slideshow or PowerPoint presentation, with the attendant backwards and forwards cycling to get to answer people’s questions – now imagine going into that same presentation with a similarly linear story you want to tell on the surface, but on each frame or slide, instead of just being able to go forwards or backwards, you can move in any axis to further bolster a point, or answer a question, show precedents, show a film, et cetera.
It gives you, the presenter, much more control over the presentation, in that you still have the points you want to make and the story you want to tell, but you also have latitude to enrich that story with the more potent graphics that Flash can handle, and layers of more information available on the fly, and just a click away.
PowerPoint was a great idea 25 years ago, but we believe this is the future of presentations – especially in building and planning projects where the ideas are so complex, and emotionally charged that you need a way to discuss them that is engaging and responsive enough to build a consensus.
PBN: Could you talk a bit about your collaboration with Animal, the movie-design studio in Providence?
KLETZIEN: We have two substantial partnerships here in Rhode Island. One is with Animal, a filmmaking company, and one is with Orange Square, a graphic design firm. Both bring talents to the table that we don’t have and can’t do in-house.
As far as Animal, they are masterful filmmakers, and we under-employ them as we’re only likely to press them into service editing together films, doing some higher-level film compositing, and shooting our live action footage. Orange Square is an exemplary graphic design firm that we work closely with, primarily in developing the e-book.
Both shops consist of artists, too, and their talents are invaluable to hold up mirror so we can see what we’re doing – the same as what we do for many architects. •
