Meet Ara Devejian of Logan

Image credit: Kenneth Kegley

 

Today we’d like to introduce you to Ara Devejian.

Ara, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
What started as a throw-away art exercise at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, ended up changing the course of my entire life. The college is expensive – with tuition now costing more than Harvard – and so I wanted every assignment, every drawing, every scrap of work to be worth it. With that in mind, I took this exercise that was nothing more than a warmup for a class, polished it up, and turned it into a big poster. Something tangible. Something for the portfolio.

ArtCenter’s student gallery got a hold of the poster and displayed it on its walls, coincidentally, the same time legendary designer and director Kyle Cooper was there. He was shopping for talent at the start of his new production company, Prologue Films. Kyle liked the poster and invited me to his house in Malibu for a project. This is pre-smartphone and so I end up getting lost somewhere in the labyrinthine Malibu canyons. After a stop at a nearby liquor store for directions and a phone call to Kyle, I finally make it to his driveway. The sun is setting.

The house is massive and overlooks the golden-lit Pacific Ocean. Coming from my $400/month shit hole apartment in Pasadena, the sight of this all is surreal. Upon walking into his living room, I’m met with stacks upon stacks of hundreds of Marvel comic books. Kyle greets me and tells me that the following morning he’s meeting with director Sam Raimi (Evil Dead, Army of Darkness, etc.) to present a book of storyboard concepts for the opening title sequence animation to Spider-man 2. After he briefs me, I sit down to work. And the panic sets in. I’m at this legend’s house, working on a big Hollywood film, it’s my first year of college, I’ve never made a storyboard before, and it’s due the following morning.

It’s now 8pm.

After a long breath and mental slap, I get to work. Tensions mount, with anxiety and doubt weighing hard, but I push forward regardless. I furiously design against the clock – drawing with this odd, teal, puck-shaped Apple mouse. As the sun rises, I finally print out my designs for Kyle’s presentation. He slips the page into a book of dozens of professional storyboards from other designers and illustrators and heads to the meeting. I go home and sleep.

Upon returning the next day, Kyle tells me that out of all of the concepts presented, Sam Raimi picked mine.

Everything changed after that point. I continued to work for Kyle for a couple of semesters (“You don’t need to finish college, I’ll teach you everything you need to know…”) and then headed back to finish up at ArtCenter. My trajectory at school morphed, from learning traditional print graphic design to motion design, as well as everything moving forward with my career, to this day. The images I designed for Kyle that night not only ended up in the final cut of Spider-man 2, but also made their way into books, articles, and eventually featured in Meggs’ History of Graphic Design.

Has it been a smooth road?
Struggles in the industry are an expected, everyday thing. New software, new techniques, new studios to compete with, new mediums, tighter and tighter deadlines, budget constraints, etc. As terrifying as it is exhilarating. If you stick around long enough in motion design, you will most likely be tasked with creating in every conceivable style (illustrative, painterly, graphic, typographic, photo-real cg, live-action, etc.).

The way I’ve confronted this multi-headed beast is to continually learn more and more about the fundamentals of image-making and storytelling. Concept, narrative structure, form, lighting, value, camera, composition, color theory, etc. are foundations I am constantly brushing upon and are universal to most mediums and styles. These topics are also the cornerstones for my curriculum at ArtCenter.

So, as you know, we’re impressed with Logan – tell our readers more, for example what you’re most proud of and what sets you apart from others.
I currently serve as a Director and Creative Director for Logan, which is a production company based in LA and NY. I’ve been here close to a decade now. We handle everything from live-action direction to design, animation, and visual effects for commercial, experiential, and film projects.

I’ve been fortunate enough to have a hand in a variety of projects from directing for live-action (co-directed Hannah John Kamen, the villain in Ant-Man and The Wasp, for a flashback sequence in the film), commercials (creative directed the MacBook Air “Lightness” commercial), video game cinematics, all the way to branding and identity and printed matter. I even got to direct a bizarre, cel-animated commercial for Cup of Noodles, Japan.

Also, as mentioned, I’ve been teaching a course in storyboarding and visual development at ArtCenter College of Design for the past four years. It is an advanced course for graphic design and illustration majors.

As if this were not enough, I also attend classes, workshops, and lectures on a variety of topics related to what I do/teach such as traditional and digital painting, drawing, photography, cg, etc.

Let’s touch on your thoughts about our city – what do you like the most and least?
Likes: Cultural diversity. One such perk being: Los Angeles is one of the great food mecca’s of the world. We are so spoiled to have not only the diversity in cuisine as we do, but that it’s so on point that it sometimes bests the real thing. The San Gabriel Valley for Szechuan and Taiwanese, Westwood for Lebanese, Torrance and Little Tokyo for Japanese, Garden Grove for Vietnamese. Korean, Peruvian, Mexican, Salvadorian, Ethiopian, Tibetan, Burmese, Thai, Filipino, Armenian, Persian… seemingly endless and so so good.

It’s also staggering how much talent exists in this city. And the number of museums, galleries, incredible schools, workshops, conferences, and events seems unparalleled with any other city in the world.

Dislikes: It can be a very impersonal, inhuman city. As if designed for cars and buildings over humans. I recently returned from Beirut and Armenia and there’s a humanity at the core of each of the cities we went to, that you just don’t find here.

One morning in Beirut, we were trying to find my dad’s childhood home that he grew up in — he hadn’t been back to Beirut in 51 years. As exact addresses don’t really exist in Beirut, we stopped by a drug store near what we thought was his neighborhood. After about 20 minutes of discussing where the house could be with the entire pharmacy staff, one of the pharmacists takes us in her car and drives us around random neighborhoods for half an hour trying to find this home. We ended up not finding it, but it was such a lovely gesture. There are countless stories like this that happened to us daily in Armenia and Beirut that I couldn’t see happening here.

Contact Info:

• Address: 4221 Redwood Avenue
  Los Angeles, CA 90066
• Website: www.logan.tv
• Phone: 310.822.1500
• Email: [email protected]
• Instagram: instagram.com/aradevejian
• Other: www.artcenter.edu

Image Credit:
Logan, Apple, Nissin, G-Shock, Justyna Stasik, Marvel, Sony

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