Hello There.

My name is Jon Weiss. I work as a commercial video artist, specializing in motion graphic animation. Operating in the space between traditional animation and visual effects, I work with illustration, photos, video, type and a range of other elements to created mixed-media 2D animation.

My practice spans the entire production cycle of animated work, from conceptualization, writing, and design all the way through illustration, animation, editing, and color and sound. This free-ranging, multi-disciplinary approach is fun for me, providing variety and the ability to craft a project from beginning to end. It also provides flexibility and efficiency for my clients. I pair these creative skills with an extensive technical skillset, spanning a wide range of illustration, animation, digital compositing, and postproduction visual effects techniques. This allows me a broad stylistic range and the ability to move seamlessly across a diverse mixture of media.     

Do you want to tell a story visually, but don’t have the option of using footage to do it? Do you have a complex or abstract idea to explain, and need visuals to make it click? When paired with good writing and solid design, animation is a powerful tool to solve creative challenges that are common in short-form documentary and journalistic work, video essays, and other “explainer”-type videos. If you’re facing such a creative challenge, give me a shout– let’s see what we can think up.

Curriculum Vitae

I bring over 24 years of experience, robust formal training, and a strong & distinctive graphic design sensibility to my work.

I started in design in 2001, and have been full-time freelance since 2003. I started in print and web, but my practice has been focused on video since 2007. I transitioned from Flash to Adobe After Effects on version 6.0, and AE has been my trusty steed ever since, through 22 versions of the software…and counting! Suffice it to say, I’ve got that saddle nicely broken in.

I hold a Masters degree in Fine Art from the Design+Technology program at Parsons, where I studied narrative media with a focus on motion graphics. I also hold a Bachelor of Arts degree from the Gallatin School at New York University. If you’re interested, you can check out more details of my resume on LinkedIn.

I live and work in the great small town of Pawlet, Vermont. When not at my desk, I serve my community as Chief of our volunteer fire department. I am also a passionate educator, and my “side gig” is teaching firefighters as a lead instructor for the Vermont Fire Academy.

So, uh… what the heck is a Surfacist?

Surfacism is a made-up term that started as a joke way back in my MFA thesis studio, but has come to both describe and inform my practice. As a 2D animator I make composite work, layering flat pieces of media atop one another. I am a specialist in working with planes: surfaces. But in a more figurative sense, I see video itself as a surface. When someone watches a time-based work on screen, she might find it to be compelling or boring, graceful or awkward, beautiful or ugly. What is being judged isn’t just one character design, or one color choice, or one transition, it is the piece as a coherent whole. You can’t shift your angle, or run your hands over it, or pick up one small piece and hold it up to the light. Video is peculiar in this way. It goes together like a building, piece by piece, layer by layer. But when finished, it’s not like a building, it’s much more like the reflection of a building in a still pond: a surface.

This is the idea I like to keep in mind as I approach my work.

Position on AI

I work at the intersection of several fields (writing, illustration, and motion graphics) that are rapidly being automated by generative AI technologies. I think it important to be very clear with clients about what role these technologies play in my work, because deploying these technologies in a commercial context raises a host of ethical, legal, and labor issues. As a commercial artist whose practice has always been technologically-facilitated, I have spent my career on the lookout for labor-saving tools I can deploy to offer better value to my clients, and less tedium for myself. I make extensive use of motion tracking, edge detection, edit detection, image tracing, and other software processing tools in my work. Software vendors have lately taken to calling these tools “AI” for marketing purposes, but they are not trained on an external dataset or processed remotely, so the moniker is a stretch.

Generative AI (ChatGPT, Midjourney, StableDiffusion, etc) tools are something very different. These tools don’t just automate, they automatically outsource, and do so exploitatively, at that– they bring to bear the work of other humans who did not consent and were not compensated. They create media that is unintentional and is not entirely under the control of the artist to manipulate as they, or their client, sees fit. That intentionality and control is what I offer to clients, and I can only offer this by remaining in complete command of my process. Craft is my thing. Outsourcing is not.

There are fantastic things people are doing with AI tools, but the automation of creative work is not one of them. Stripped of humanity and labor, I see creative work as not just valueless, but also pointless. Who wants to read texts written by machines, or look at illustrations made by machines? Perhaps more importantly, who wants to live in a world without illustrators or writers to perceive and represent our human experience?

TLDR: Generative AI has no place in my practice. If you pay me, you are paying for a human to do thoughtful, intentional work on your behalf, and when I am done we can hang out together. It’s better that way, don’t you think?