Tala continued to explore her love for the art of moving image taking on a role making videos at the The New York Times, before starting her own creative studio Two Toes. Co-founded alongside fellow designer and artist Kika Macfarane, the pair worked collaboratively on projects dedicated to visual storytelling for causes and brands such as Nature Conservancy, Planned Parenthood, Patagonia, and Substack. Now flying solo, Tala’s portfolio is fit to bursting with inventive mix-media animations, witty wordplay and sensitive interpretations of the beauty that she finds in all things that might be considered ‘mundane’ or ‘everyday’. The goal with her animation work of late? To “always surprise myself with something new”, Tala says.
To create a unique visual language for each animated piece, Tala can find herself starting out on a project in a number of different ways. For a recent music video for Martin Buttrich and Charles Levine for the track Festival Queen, the artist spent hours “making marks out of all different kinds of paint, stamps and paper”, and for her independent short Night In, she repurposed “a really bad roll of film I shot on a trip to the mountains in Spain” – the foggy appearance of which became a cornerstone to the film’s look.
Never starting out on an entirely ‘the blank page’, the animator often gives herself a set of warm up activities or sifts through a collections of things she holds on to for inspiration: “My favourite part of the process is getting to play with the pieces of my visual library after I create them. It’s like getting to explore a strange new reality made out of only things I love,” she shares.