Conner Griffith is a video artist and animator living in Los Angeles. He is interested in working with collections to explore the unexpected stories that can emerge from visual choreography and the relationship between sound and image. He has been nominated for an Emmy in editing, and was a Young Guns 17 winner. His short films have screened at numerous festivals, including Slamdance, GLAS and OIAF. He has directed and animated work for Apple, Google, Hermes, Balenciaga, PBS, BMW, Coldplay, Max Cooper, and more.

Hey Conner, thanks for sitting down with us! How’s life these days? Anything exciting or new happening in LA?

Hi! Life is good, all things considered. What isn’t exciting and new happening in LA, or anywhere for that matter??

Your work is so precise and detailed - it’s like there’s no room for mistakes. Are you naturally a perfectionist or does that level of precision just happen as you go?

I'm definitely a perfectionist, but always trying to find a balance between working with a high level of precision, and letting chance drive the ship. Perfectionism is most important to me when you’re working towards the effect you want to have on the viewer - that’s where I try to avoid any mistakes.

(Left) Dive Study (Right) 10XL Sneaker for Balenciaga

Let’s talk about your creative space. Where do you do most of your work? Is it the kind of place that feels perfectly organized, or do you thrive in a bit of creative chaos?

I usually work from home at my desk, outside on my patio, or in my living room. I like working in a big open space like a living room for conceptualization, and a more controlled space like an office for execution. I also recently invested in a studio space for photography and video. I’m still learning how to navigate that space. Generally for all of my workplaces I like an organized mise en scene.

Your projects like Still Life and Flat City No. 1 are visually stunning and deeply conceptual. How do ideas like these come to you?

Thanks! They’re both projects born of working with collections, and are both extremely process based. I think projects like these aren’t so much ideas that I’ve had that I’m trying to execute, but more a feeling like there’s something to explore there. For Still Life, it was 2020 during covid, and I was moving apartments, forced to look at all the objects in my life. I became really interested in these objects as an extension of me, my mind, and humanity generally.

For Flat City, I had become really interested in aerial photography and satellites, and had recently purchased a drone I was getting familiar with. While shooting, I was finding I particularly liked shots that had very little perspective, no horizon-line, almost isometric, like a third-person video game. I developed a technique in After Effects to distort these shots to be completely isometric, and from there the possibilities of attaching shots to each other were kind of endless. Flat City No. 1 is the first iteration of a technique I’m continuing to explore.

We're really drawn to how you bring those 19th-century engravings to life in Still Life. What made you start working with these old prints? Do you think of yourself more as an archivist, an artist or a bit of both?

For Still Life I went into the project knowing I wanted to make a short film that explored objects and objectivity. The very early stages of that actually involved shooting a lot of still lives of different mundane objects, but through research for the film found these incredible archives of 18th-19th century engravings, and realized this was going to be a much more efficient way to experiment with a language of objects. I don’t think of myself as an archivist… more an artist that scavenges archives… My work has certainly benefited from the work of archivists!

Composed of over 1000 engravings from the 19th century, Still Life is a meditation on subject/object dualism. The film explores the idea that we live in a world of objects and a world of objects lives within us. Working with this encyclopedia of prints as a sort of language, a story of consciousness emerges.

Conner made the entire Still life object library available for download, which you can access through here.

Flat City No. 1 plays with so many layers of perspective and movement. How do you balance the complexity of the visuals with making sure they feel cohesive and easy to follow for the viewer?

It was tricky - as an editor and animator, I’m usually concerned with making sure things feel cohesive and easy to follow in time, but this piece felt more like building a sculpture, or at least a landscape painting, which was new for me. I think the piece works because you can take it in very simply from a distance, it only becomes complex once you get up close to it.

Your match cuts and transitions are so seamless. Do you see these as the backbone of your style? How much time goes into finding or creating those perfect moments of harmony?

I love the idea of a match cut symbolically, I’m happy to recognize it as a pillar of my style. I think it’s beautiful when two disparate things are connected in an unexpected way. Creating replacement animation sequences (match cut sequences) is very time consuming, but finding harmonic moments between subjects can happen in an instant - it can happen by accident, and often does.

When you’re not working, what does a typical day look like for you?

I’m probably playing basketball, or skateboarding, or walking my dog Arthur. Or working!

Your collaborations are so varied - from Coldplay to Hermès to PBS. How do you approach balancing your personal artistic vision with a client’s brief? Is there a particular collaboration that’s been especially memorable?

The best clients are the ones that are interested in your artistic vision in the first place. The client briefs I get usually reference work that I’ve done in the past - the challenge for me is to sell them a different artistic vision from what they think I do, so that I’m challenging myself to do something new. I recently did a shoot/edit for Sandro in my new studio - it was my first time doing product photography in a controlled studio environment, it was super fun!

A lot of your work feels rooted in nostalgia, but it also has a futuristic edge. Do you see yourself as someone who bridges the past and the present?

That’s interesting! I’ve never thought about my work being nostalgic or futuristic, but I think about time a lot. My thesis film at RISD, Auto, involved playing with time in tightly choreographed, non-linear ways, manipulating time-lapse imagery frame by frame. In this sense I definitely see myself as someone bridging past and present. I like to think of time as an object, malleable.

You’ve achieved so much - an Emmy nomination, Young Guns 17 and screenings all over the world. What’s next for you? What are you dreaming about?

I’m excited to get back to making artwork. I really see the value in continually cultivating a garden of personal projects. Things that aren’t made to win awards or boost your portfolio, that are just made to do something new and potentially open a window to a meaningful experience. I’ve been expanding my sense of how and where that meaningful experience can happen - I’ve been dreaming about interactivity!