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Crossroads for the Arts

Mar 1, 2009 12:00 PM, By Eric Melin

Content creation in Kansas City.

           

After graduating with film degrees from the University of Kansas, SenoReality Pictures cofounders Ryan S. Jones (left) and Patrick Rea decided to stay in the Kansas City area.
Photo by Blane Sutton.

You might have heard of Kansas City's most famous filmmaker. After brief stints at the Pesmen-Rubin Art Studio and the Kansas City Film Ad Company, Walt Disney started Laugh-O-Gram Studio in 1922. Although he packed up and moved to Hollywood little more than a year later, he already had a soon-to-be-famous stable of animators in his employ and the inspiration for his flagship character, Mickey Mouse.

The city Disney left behind is a surprisingly rich content-creation community — with more of a history of filmmaking than one might think. When University of Kansas (KU) graduate F.O. Calvin founded the local educational and industrial film outfit the Calvin Company in 1931, he embraced affordable 16mm early and became the country's leading producer of films for businesses and schools throughout the '40s and '50s. One director who cut his teeth during the Calvin heyday, Robert Altman, shot his first feature film — The Delinquents (1957) — in two weeks in Kansas City.

At the same time, just 45 miles west of Kansas City on I-70, Centron Corporation was making its own industrial, educational, and governmental films. Housed in what is now the main building of the KU film department, the company was the training ground for cult director Herk Harvey, who worked there for 35 years and eventually taught film production at the university. Using coworkers and mostly local actors, he shot the eerie and influential 1962 horror film Carnival of Souls in a two-week time span as well.

If something about Kansas City brings out unorthodox innovation and speed, it's still there — fueling content-creation businesses that leverage Midwestern advantages over coastal glamour.

Kansas City-based motion-graphics company MK12 has worked with high-profile clients such as Adidas, Budweiser, ESPN, MTV, and Cartoon Network. The nine-person art collective works on Adobe After Effects, Photoshop, and Illustrator, as well as Autodesk Maya.

MK12

Started by four graduates/dropouts of the Kansas City Art Institute in 2000, MK12 has grown to a nine-person art collective that's known across the world for its inventive motion-graphic design. The company's profile was raised considerably last year when London-based Eon Productions hired MK12 to design the graphic interface of MI6's computers and direct the title sequence for the latest James Bond movie, Quantum of Solace. The stylish opening features the iconic silhouette of Bond — Walther PPK drawn — wandering around a desert that is made up as much of soaring naked female curves as it is of sand.

“It's the first time they brought in a non-British commercial director,” says MK12 cofounder Tim Fisher of the Bond opening, one of the Holy Grails of modern commercial graphic design. “We pitched for six or eight months of time. [At first] we didn't have the titles. … We were just doing the 2D animation interface stuff. Through that, we paralleled all that work with working on pitches to talk to Eon and its crew.”

Although MK12 shot its first round of tests in London, the group used its own greenscreen stage back in Kansas City to secure the deal with a long, persuasive motion test. Located in the northeast corner of the Crossroads Arts District, MK12 occupies a warehouse with a brick façade and a sign out front that reads “MK12 Tactical Design and Research Bureau: Worldwide Ultraglobal International Top Secret Superheadquarters.”

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