Daniel Misota

Daniel Misota / media design portfolio Good design in my opinion is a seamless way of conveying identity. Putting as little weight on a message as possible. Searching for metaphores. Finding the narrative in the material things to match the abstract qualities. In my work I aim for accuracy, transparency and ingenuity that supports the substance. Throughout the following pages I’m presenting some case studies from my portfolio. Table of contents: Works in motion pictures as director of photography............................................................................................................. page 1-2 Graphic design works in the music industry.............................................................................................................................. page 3-4 Applied and personal creative writing......................................................................................................................................... page 5-6 Miscellaneous...................................................................................................................................................................................... page 7 Contact.................................................................................................................................................................................................. page 8 testimonial / cover Daniel Misota / media design portfolio As director of photography on the short film Day-In Day-Out, my job was to recreate a long gone era of filmmaking. The goal was to find a hugely stylized look indebted to that of film noirs of the ‘40s and early French Nouvelle Vague classics like Alphaville or The 400 Blows. The story follows a young woman escaping a self-destructive relationship. To emphasize that, my decision was to hide her face behind shadows of leaves and bars and other objects in the foreground in compositions often inspired by the lesser known, black and white photography of Saul Leiter. For shooting the film I used a period accurate anamorphic lens and often applied cleverly placed single bulb lighting and low-key backgrounds to evoke a sense of loneliness that was inherent to the film. motion picture / page 1 Daniel Misota / media design portfolio Off-White is a short film dealing with young adult struggles through increasingly surreal episodes of a young man wandering around memories of his shortcomings in romantic and professional life. While designing the film’s visual style, I looked at the color works of cinematographer Łukasz Żal, especially his recent work on Charlie Kaufman’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things whose often operatic nature seemed to befit the restlessness of this story. To match the director’s stream of consciousness style storytelling, I did a lot of handheld work in the film, tracking the young man of ever-changing name through the semi-existant spaces he forces himself into. motion picture / page 2 Daniel Misota / media design portfolio Throughout my time as the in-house art director at my company Lone Waltz Records I designed quite a few album covers for folk musicians and singer-songwriters of the region. Three of them are especially close to my heart. Lack of Lightness is the record of a folk duo slightly reminiscent of acts like The Milk Carton Kids with a hint of heartland rock to their sound. Kapunyitó is a more contemporary, self-examining record by an indie-folk artist. Friend or Foe’s sound evokes the lyrical world of Elliott Smith with a specific attachment to personal space and objects in its immersive narrative wit. graphic design / page 3 Daniel Misota / media design portfolio At Lone Waltz Records my responsibilites also included the creation of all digital and print media. I designed the visual communication of more than fifty live music events, twelve extended or long play releases and the live music video series Live Waltz. The task was to capture the essence of the artists while also maintaining an identifiable and coherent visual presence of the label in our branded content. graphic design / page 4 Daniel Misota / media design portfolio “On a winter eve was washed ashore with a hundred thick skinned stiffs aboard a somber ship of leather goods sold by Vienna’s finest crooks...” Fleece Boulevard is a speculative work I developed last year with the purpose of potentially being used for a tourism campaign of a major European airline. The series consists of fictional visitors arriving to the airline’s destinations, either in the present day or way back at some point in history. These characters then encounter stories from urban legends and well documented urban history alike, all related to neighborhoods, buildings and other architectural units relevant to the current bloodstream of the cities’ tourism. All episodes are narrated by the host of the show - reminiscent of childens’ show hosts of the 80s - in Edgar Allan Poe-esque verse. These post-modern urban tales aim to provide a more immersive experience of exploring new places, and provide fun educational material broadening the horizons of the infotainment format. creative writing / page 5 Daniel Misota / media design portfolio Money is a personal essay film I created a while ago. It is a playful meditation on our priorities as a society based on who we decide to commemorate by putting them on our bank notes. In the film two elderly ladies play with bills as if they were action cards. The value of every bill in the game is defined by the number of deaths directly or indirectly caused by the historical personality on the note. The well-off host of the game seems to be winning while her underdog contender is running out of all the Hungarian Forints she brought when she finds a Swedish Kronor in her wallet. Regardless of the fact that the currency bears the images of intellectuals with no deaths to their account, the 20 kronor bill is winning against all Hungarian bills thanks to its dynamic strengthening in value over the past decade compared to the forint. At the end of the film the underdog leaves with a big stack of money, winning the game against her furious contender. creative writing / page 6 Daniel Misota / media design portfolio Gemma is a conceptual memorial site of the treaty of Trianon ending World War I and redrawing Hungary’s borders, cutting the country in half. Even a hundred years after discussions of the event in our current political discourse are hugely traumatized. Gemma is an architectural experiment to give shape to our way of processing grief. It also reminds us of the relativity of our interpretation. The site is composed of two pieces: a concrete foundation that is disorienting to walk on and a living tree vertically cut in half. It is a contemplative space inspired by the Japanese garden that aims to take the heat out of the argument around the event, and shows us how our fate as a nation is inseparably linked to that of our neighbours. miscellaneous / page 7 Daniel Misota / media design portfolio I am eligible for employment within the European Union and I can be contracted through my enterprise from overseas. I can also be contacted through the Hungarian Media Artists’ Association (MOVUM). - contact / page 8