Heal the Gulf raises funds for cleanup

HELPFUL ARTIST— Thousand Oaks resident and wildlife artist Jerry Sawitz designed a T-shirt with his original artwork. He is selling the shirts online to raise money to restore the Gulf.RICHARD GILLARD/Acorn NewspapersJerry Sawitz knows a little something about the creative process.

A world-renowned wildlife artist whose work has appeared in almost every major aquarium and zoo in the United States, Sawitz is well aware of what it takes to transform a vision into a finished piece of art.

So when one of his friends suggested Sawitz use his talents to raise funds in the wake of April’s massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, he began with a simple plan: a T-shirt featuring some of the animal species harmed by the crude bubbling up from the ocean floor.

But it wasn’t enough.

“I really didn’t know what to do,” said Sawitz, who’s taught art at Thousand Oaks High School for 32 years.

Soon the creative juices began running in different directions. The 57-year-old started bouncing ideas off two of his prized pupils— his son Tanner and Tanner’s good friend Nathaniel Dueber, both 18 and June graduates of T.O. High School.

Before long, the trio had formulated a plan that would bridge a 40-year generation gap and bring a positive message to an area of the country where negatives have become the norm.

Marrying watercolors with the World Wide Web, they created Heal the Gulf, a fundraiser for the 21st century. The three-minute YouTube short film, shot and edited by Dueber, documents Jerry Sawitz’s creation of the T-shirt, accompanied by original music written and performed by Tanner Sawitz.

“The end result is just so different than everything I envisioned,” Jerry Sawitz said. “It became this creative collaboration that just went beyond what I saw.

“To me, that’s what made it so special. Because I’ve been an art teacher for so long, I’ve always been intrigued by the creative process. It’s exciting to throw these things out there and see what (others) come up with.”

The initial collaborators were Jerry Sawitz and Dueber, who was awarded a Presidential Scholarship from Chapman University and is enrolled in its Dodge College School of Film.

Sawitz pitched the idea of turning the fundraiser into a multimedia effort, and Dueber grabbed the reins.

“By the time I explained what I kind of wanted to happen, he walked in with a script,” Sawitz said.

Dueber had penned a 1½-page screenplay of shots he wanted, centered around Sawitz’s creation of the artwork for the T-shirt.

Once Sawitz completed a couple of hours of research about the design, which features six species affected by the spill, the two went to work.

As Sawitz embarked on the 14-hour process of drawing and painting the original artwork in his home studio, Dueber used two video cameras—a digital set up on a tripod and a hand-held tape version for close-up shots—to capture the process.

Armed with hours of footage, Dueber used tricks of the filmmaking trade to pare it down to a two-minute-45-second film, using his own home studio for the editing process.

“I took that 10 hours of footage and really compressed it,” Dueber said. “I wanted to try to make it entertaining.”

Finding the right music for the dialogue-free film was paramount. That’s where the younger Sawitz entered the collaboration.

An aspiring writer who’s attending Moorpark College this fall, Tanner Sawitz is also a selftaught musician with an affinity for instruments that are off the beaten path. Eager to lend his own talents to the project, he sat down at his dulcimer—a trapezoidshaped stringed instrument—and started tinkering.

“I’ve had it for years, but I’ve never sat down and tried to learn it well,” Tanner Sawitz said. “I thought it was the sound we were looking for. . . . It’s a beautiful instrument.”

Using his own home studio to record a final version, he added the last layer to the most organic of collaborations.

“It was really cool to work with the two of them and produce something using all of our skills,” Tanner Sawitz said.

“I couldn’t have hoped for anything better, really. It bloomed into this video that was edited perfectly. Dueber, I knew he was really good, but I didn’t know he was this good. He made the painting come to life, and he really made the music work well with it.”

The “Heal the Gulf” video can be found on the YouTube website by searching either “BP Gulf oil leak tshirt” or “Playmaker 144,” Dueber’s username on the site.

The site also includes a link to purchase T-shirts featuring Jerry Sawitz’s watercolor painting. The shirts, produced by Dolphin Shirt Company in San Luis Obispo, cost $15, with 20 percent being donated to the National Wildlife Federation.

“We want this to be a very positive thing,” the artist said. “If we can contribute (to restoring the Gulf) in any way, that’s what we want to do.”