Just a quick note to say that we’ll no longer be actively updating this site. It’s been a great run. And thanks for stopping by.

For Michael’s current exploits please visit him here. Raafi maintains a blog of pictures and a personal site.

It only took us five months since shooting… but we got it done. Here’s the video for Thaddeus Clark’s Downtown/Connect. The (banging) song is available for download at hellabasic.com. Special shots to my editor Jay Morales who slogged through many weekends and evenings to help bring this to the light of day.

Every now and then, the scout is the best part of the shoot.

A lot of times I’ve done work that doesn’t fall under the scope of Desedoish-ness and don’t get around to posting it. Then am reminded awhile later why it might be nice to share. Here’s the result of a trip to Jamaica in ’09. This film has been used to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for the Rockhouse Foundation.

The Rockhouse Hotel, meanwhile, was featured in last week’s Times article on great getaways. What I’m saying is you should get down with these folks no matter what.

For the past few seasons I’ve shot video for Gary Graham’s fashion week presentations under the tutelage of Alex Antitch for Ace Collective. Antitch is Graham’s regular photographer and the creative director of his most recent shows. This time around the shoot was at Graham’s recently christened Tribeca space. There was the usual frenetic energy belowdecks and the calm focus of execution above.

During the first fifteen minutes of the show photographers jostle for position in front of the attendees. “Hey man, you’re in my shot.” It’s a scrum. After they decamp, there’s room for everyone to look.

Desedo family member Bradford Young has done it again. This time the venue is the Sundance film festival where he has won the Cinematography award for the U.S. film Pariah. We suspect that it is also the first of many great distinctions to come. The film, directed by Dee Rees, played the festival a year ago as a short, and has already been picked up for distribution by Focus Features. Brad was actually at Sundance with two features this year: Pariah, and Andrew Dosunmu’s Restless City.

I first met Brad in grad school and we’ve had a great many discussions over the years about a life in film — working together when possible. Inspired by a four-hour conversation we once had on color correction, we recorded one of our conversations. Here’s what happened.

Being from Louisville, Brad has an even bigger legend to live up to. Here’s hoping he can top that one as well!

I always wondered if the biz people at Gap cynically pushed that BS logo on us a few months ago as a way to generate PR after having seen the media storm over the Tropicana packaging. Sorry Gap. I swing to American Apparel, both for t-shirts, and Helvetica-based logo.

But Howard Schultz seems to speak the language of design in a way that Marka Hansen, president of Gap, seems to have missed when the company attempted to crowdsource the logo project via facebook. I buy Shultz’ reasons for the switch, and the new logo remains Starbucks-y, which I guess is the point. The elephant approves.

This past Halloween saw team Desedo plus a few hundred of our closest friends breaking things down in Brooklyn. At some point the camera came out. We’ll call it an exercise in creativity, a night of fun captured on film… Embedded journalism! All of that to say that time marches forward. And we like to march right along beside it. At times with booze and homies.

The Monster Mash was thrown by Jamie and Debbie (whose freshly minted ghost kitty is worth a checkout too). Of course, the scariest costume of the night goes to the guy with the custom-embroidered Bed Bugs hat and strap-on mattress. Don’t wave that thing at me, buddy.

– UPDATE:
an even better pic of the bed bugs costume:

Not our elephant, but close.

People often ask where the idea for the Desedo logo came from. And for them, I have scant little information — an image I thought up. There were tons of elephants dancing in my mind around the time that the specific one we use now was drawn. But it’s reassuring to know that it comes from somewhere real. And that someone has actually seen the image I was only imagining at the time.

Ami Vitale has clearly been there. And, judging from her portfolio, a few other places too.

We had a little break from the norm here at Desedo HQ recently. It’s not all fun and games in the writers’ room. It just looks that way.