Director/designer Daniel Garcia, whose work spans commercials, music videos, broadcast design, interactive media and environmental design, has joined the production studio vitamin. Winner of the Best Music Video Award at this year’s SXSW Festival, Garcia has earned high praise for his unconventional artistic approach and facility in working with a variety of media, including live action, Flash animation, stop motion, print and still photography.
Garcia’s arrival is part of a new effort by vitamin to grow its creative team and extend the scope of its work, especially in live action and new and emerging forms of media. “We set out to find a kindred spirit, someone who shares our love for telling simple stories in unique ways,” said vitamin Director Ryan Dunn. “Danny embodies that persona perfectly. He’s a great fit, and we’re happy to have him.”

For his part, Garcia said that he was attracted by vitamin’s strong reputation in advertising and impressed with the depth of its production and post production resources. “I love the work that vitamin has done for Nike, McDonald’s, Budweiser and others,” he said. “I would like to focus more attention on commercials, and would like to have more opportunities to apply the visual techniques I have developed to advertising.” Garcia added that he also hopes to do more work in interactive and environmental media.

Garcia has compiled an unusually diverse credit list in his young career. He got his start with New York advertising agency DDB as a member of its in-house design team, and worked on projects for such accounts as Budweiser, Volkswagen and Compaq. He later worked as a freelance designer for MTV, Nike and Sony, among others. He has a longstanding relationship with Cartoon Network and recently directed a series of animated music videos for Chrome Children, a branded DVD produced jointly by the channel’s Adult Swim and Stones Throw Records.

In 2001, Garcia, along with several European partners, formed the design studio Super-Fi., that has since developed into a full service, multi-national visual communications agency. He joined Bent Image in 2007 and since then has directed music videos for a number of emerging artists. Me-I, which he directed for the band TV on the Radio took the top honor at SXSW. It also won for Best Video at the Stuttgart Animation Festival. Garcia won a MTV Woodie in 2007 for the Madvillain video Monkey Suite.

“My videos are all quite different from one another, some use Flash, some use 3D, some use live action and outrageous costumes, and yet they all fit together under a common theme,” Garcia said. “I was able to pull together some amazing talent for those projects.”

Garcia’s advertising credits includes a series of Internet spots for Nike mixing live action and graphics. He has also directed broadcast spots for Converse and Nokia. Additionally, he created a graphics-based, high-resolution video promotion for Kyocera that played on giant screens in Time’s Square and Tokyo’s Shinjuku District.
vitamin is located at 216 W. Ohio Street, 5th floor, Chicago, IL 60610. For more information, call (312) 664-6683 or visit www.vitaminpictures.tv