Ransom & Mitchell
Ransom & Mitchell is the wonderful mess created from smashing together the creative talents of set designer –
digital artist Stacey Ransom and director – photographer Jason Mitchell.
“Our approach combines cinematic lighting with distinctive scenery and digital artistry to create what cannot exist”.
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THE REAL STORY
Part of our success is based on the deepest level of respect we have for each other. We are lucky to have very complimentary skill sets so that we can hand a project back and forth as it moves along. We develop the creative concepts together, building upon each other’s ideas. In the execution, Jason focuses on the technical side of the camera, lighting, while directing the talent. Stacey employs her artistic training with a charge over the styling teams for Scenics, wardrobe, hair, and makeup. Once captured, Jason will do the initial cleanup and building of the final composition, and Stacey does the heavy lifting of CG, compositing, and digital painting. Jason then does the final file preparation and printing for delivery. While each has control over a certain segment, the other is there as an advisor / sounding board for ideas and how they can work together. We’ve been adapting our styles and skills to evolve with our style and ideas. Our move as of late is to create more complex scenes using CG to continue pushing our narratives.
Stacey’s early commercial career was spent working as a Senior Designer for the Limited Stores, Creative Director of Columbia Spo
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rtswear, and VP Principal of Branding for VIA in San Francisco. With these companies she directed a wide variety of photo shoots for seasonal marketing campaigns. Jason studied acting at Carnegie Mellon before working as a broadcast journalist in the US Navy spending much of that time overseas in Japan. Returning to San Francisco, he established live studios for emerging streaming media market before moving into independent commercial production, and then photography. During this lead up time to working as Ransom & Mitchell,
a few early collaborations included short narrative films (Lucifer’s Crewcut) and an award-winning feature documentary on the genocide in Darfur with director Mark Brecke (The Turned Our Desert Into Fire).
We began our collaboration in still work in 2009, and have just begun to test out our efforts. In the beginning, we have a rather large space to create in which allowed us to explore many ideas and grow quickly. Having found a more specific sense of our work, we now realize we’re at the beginning of a long journey that we hope will last a long time. Whereas before, we built a number of our sets, we’ve found now that our CG skills can allow us to take these concepts a bit further, while allowing us to maximize our on – set capture time with models and stylists. It’s an important add to our toolbox of how we create. In some ways, we have begun again, and are starting to push forward with a more seasoned approach. It’s an exciting turn at the moment.
Our current fine art series is Ghost Town, that will be showing at our solo exhibition at Vanilla Gallery in Tokyo in the spring. It incorporates both CG / photography compilations as well as CG only works. We’ve finished a few and will be focused on building up these for the next few months. It’s been very enjoyable, and has allowed us to realize a number of ideas we’ve had.
die Familie, 2013
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We were introduced to “die Familie” years ago upon discovering a box of artifacts and ephemera that were so strange they left us wondering what was fact and what was conjecture. We spent years following clues back to the old country where the contents of this box originated. We traced back to a region outside a small German town and ascertained more about this abnormal brood.
It would seem they had become quite infamous amongst the wary, simple townsfolk of the day and many of the tales were those of fearful myths. None the less, it was clear to us, that “die Familie” was the stuff of legend.
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We decided to honor their past and asked the artist collective of ZeroFriends if they would collaborate with us to create a series of reenactment portraits. Much to our delight, Robert Bowen, Dave Correia, Alex Pardee, Quake, Chloe Rice, Skinner & Jonathan Wayshak whole-heartedly agreed and it is their partnership of both heart and mind that has allowed the unbelievable truths to be revealed.
We feel strongly that “die Familie NullFreund,” despite their strangeness to the so-called normal world, deserves to be celebrated and honored. They have crossed our paths and cut a slash across our hearts that has marked us forever. We have grown to admire their peculiar predilections and feverishly agree that blood is, in fact, tastier than water.
Read the full article on Lens Magazine Issue #38
