Two design teams. Blank walls. One live battle.
Arrogance and Envy follows the Monorex design team as they face the Marc Ecko team in a Secret Walls live art competition.
Documented across two events—an art exhibition and the competition itself—the short captures the artists, personalities and culture surrounding the event before moving into the intensity of creating artwork live, under pressure and in front of an audience.
Visually, the film draws from the same stark black-and-white graphic language as the artists themselves, blurring the line between documenting their work and becoming part of its aesthetic.
I was brought in to document these events with only a day or two to prepare, which meant walking into the production without knowing exactly what conditions I would encounter.
The art show turned out to be particularly challenging. Lighting was poor, the environment was noisy, and the interview footage wasn't as clean as I would normally want.
Rather than fight those limitations, I decided to make them part of the film.
The chaotic location sound became a way of communicating what these live events actually felt like—the crowd, noise and energy weren't technical problems to eliminate completely; they were part of the experience.
The interviews required a more radical solution.
The artists were working primarily in a bold black-and-white graphic and graffiti aesthetic. I realized I could use that same visual language to solve the problems with my footage. I converted the interview sequences into black-and-white illustrations, treating the footage frame by frame until the people themselves appeared to exist inside the graphic world of the artwork.
What began as a practical attempt to rescue difficult footage became one of the film's defining visual ideas.
The experience reinforced an approach that has stayed with me throughout my work: when production gives you a limitation, sometimes the best solution isn't to hide it. It's to turn it into the style.