Susan A. Burig wants every current Indiana University of Pennsylvania student to know that there are no limits on what they can be. She’s confident her fellow Crimson Hawks can follow in her footsteps to become a Hollywood graphic designer, or find similar success in their field of choice.
“I was them 40 years ago,” the Shaler native and 1988 IUP graduate told the Post-Gazette. “You don’t have to go to some big, expensive art school to make something of yourself. It’s what you do with it.”
Burig has been working consistently on major movies and television shows since the late 1990s. Over the last decade, she has become one of Marvel Studios’ go-to graphic designers on projects ranging from 2014’s “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” to next year’s “Captain America: Brave New World.”
On Thursday, members of the IUP community can catch Burig back at her alma mater delivering a presentation about “the secret world of graphic design for filmmaking.” She’ll be doing that as part of the university’s inaugural “Slenkfest,” which is named after late IUP graphic design professor Robert Slenker and aims to connect current students with accomplished alumni like Burig.
“Slenkfest, at its core, is a celebration of the program and the relationships between our alumni and our students, which are key to the ongoing successes of the graphic design and illustration program,” Tony DiMauro, the program’s coordinator, said via IUP’s website. “There’s so much demand for graphic artists, and our program prepares our talented students to be career-ready.”
Burig was born in California, but raised in Pittsburgh’s North Hills. Western Pennsylvania’s many cultural offerings provided a great backdrop for Burig’s natural thirst for “life, knowledge, learning and everything.” She ended up at IUP alongside the likes of The Clarks lead singer Scott Blasey and artist John Ritter, whose “Energy and Color: Thirty Years of Illustration by John Ritter” exhibition will be featured in IUP’s University Museum during Slenkfest.
After her four years at IUP, Burig started a local graphic design business and began racking up experience. She eventually began stepping in front of the camera as a model represented by Pittsburgh-based Docherty Talent Agency. Burig always loved movies and slowly began gaining experience as both an actor and production assistant on the Western Pennsylvania sets of Hollywood films like 1993’s “Striking Distance” and 1996’s “Kingpin.”
It never occurred to Burig during college that pursuing a career in Hollywood would be an option for her. She began her entertainment industry journey at at time when most productions were still outsourcing that work, as opposed to having an on-set designer. After getting her SAG card on “Striking Distance,” Burig started volunteering her graphic design skills on films like “Kingpin.”
She was brought on to the 1997 Chris Farley comedy “Beverly Hills Ninja” as a graphic designer and has since performed those duties on nearly 60 features. Her filmography includes two “Austin Powers” movies, 2001’s “The Wedding Planner” and “Pearl Harbor,” 2005’s “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” two “Transformers” adventures, 2012’s “Django Unchained,” 2018’s “Avengers: Infinity War,” and 2019’s “Avengers: Endgame.”
“When the spaceship lands, you get in it!” Burig quipped.
The trickiest thing about discussing Burig’s actual job is that, if she’s doing it well, no one will realize she was ever even there.
Essentially, Burig’s role on a film set is to “design the details that make that world real” — or, as she also referred to her work, the “blurry stuff in the background.” That can manifest itself on screen as everything from period-accurate wallpaper to all the neon present throughout the planet Contraxia in 2017’s “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2.”
Her designs appear on screen in places like the Bucky Barnes section of a Captain America museum exhibit in “Winter Solider,” the Pym Tech logo in 2015’s “Ant-Man,” “a lot of slave bills” in “Django Unchained” and a secret codebook in last year’s locally shot “The Pale Blue Eye.” Burig’s work can get so granular that she sometimes finds herself creating softball uniforms and neck tattoos for a few quick “Ant-Man” shots.
“It’s just so bloody interesting what I do!” she declared. “It’s always a challenge. It’s problem-solving and, well, how do we do this on a budget in a certain time frame?”
That’s the sort of thing Burig will be delving into during her IUP lecture later this week. She plans to dispense wisdom, give out “some movie swag” and hopefully leave everyone in attendance with “a deeper appreciation” for how the Hollywood sausage gets made.
“They’ll learn something new,” she teased. “Everyone loves movies. They will look at movies differently.”
Joshua Axelrod: jaxelrod@post-gazette.com and X @jaxelburgh.
First Published: April 10, 2024, 9:30 a.m.
Updated: April 10, 2024, 7:54 p.m.
