Caresse Haaser

Video art director / producer / motion graphics artist

“What we are doing, of course, it’s shaping the future. Maybe it will be used, I don’t know, a hundred years from now. But it’s still important.”

In June of 2022 I connected with animator and video journalist Kolin Pope. He was directing a series of short films for the winners of the prestigious Fields Medal in Mathematics. These would play during the following month’s award ceremony at the International Congress of Mathematicians. Each video featured a short section of animation explaining the subject’s award-winning work. My subject was Maryna Viazovska. She is Ukrainian, and only the second woman ever to have won a Fields Medal.

2022 Fields Medalist: Maryna Viazovska

“Sexual Fantasies. Attraction. Birth Control. Fertility. Childbirth… This isn’t the sex education you may have had to sit through in school.” - Vox

I had the privilege of helping to lead the design & animation style on the Sex miniseries of Explained. 

Sex, Explained

Last year, FIFA released a greenhouse gas accounting report for Qatar's World Cup, estimating that the tournament's carbon footprint would total 3.6 million metric tons of CO2 emissions.

But climate groups aren't buying it. We spoke to Khaled Diab of Carbon Market Watch, an organization that earlier this year released a report challenging Qatar and FIFA's sustainability claims. We also talked to climate economist Danny Cullenward about Qatar's reliance on carbon offsetting as a means of achieving "net-zero" emissions.

FIFA claims Qatar's World Cup is "carbon neutral"

I was the illustrator/animator for Diamonds, Explained. Of the series, it was one of my favorite episodes to work on. You can watch at Netflix.com/Explained.

Diamonds, Explained

From monarchies to mea culpas, pooches to plastic surgery, explore a wide range of fascinating topics in this celebrity-narrated docuseries.

Explained Season 3

Axios: While today’s AI can solve complex problems, it’s still far from approximating human intelligence. Here’s why some researchers say that to get there, we should start by teaching computers to think like toddlers.

I really enjoyed pushing the concepts of rapid development, automation and mechanical motion in this piece—almost as if a computer had helped to animate it.

Why AI May Need To Think Like A Toddler

“We all should know that diversity makes for a rich tapestry, and we must understand that all the threads of the tapestry are equal in value no matter what their color.” - Maya Angelou

My first episodes as art director on Explained were a three-part miniseries about US Democracy and its electoral system. These episodes, produced in collaboration with Leonardo DiCaprio, were to air just two months ahead of the 2020 Presidential Election. No pressure!