thanks to the ladies and gents at topspin, we were asked to do a talk at the IFP independent filmmaker labs last week because of our work on tronsoundtrack.com. on thursday morning i spoke to a room full of documentary film makers hoping to find their way in the online world now that their various projects were nearing completion and needed some kind of apt promotion.
the talk went extremely well, which is surprising given it was literally the first thing of this kind that we’ve ever done aside from giles’s PACA panel discussion back in ’08. we’d like to thank rose vincelli and jonathan reiss for considering us for the task and for making us feel so welcome throughout the process. it’s looking like we’ll be doing more of these talks in future now that we’ve gotten a feel for it. we’ll try and post on twitter or similar when such things are about to occur. you know, should you want to come say hi or whatever.
i’d also very much like to add that i had no idea who jonathan reiss was when i met him over email, in person or when he introduced my talk. i mean i thought his name seemed familiar, but i never would have guessed this was the same jonathan reiss who’s work i have been in awe of for years. you see this is the man who directed the famously ‘banned’ happiness in slavery video for nine inch nails. a video that literally changed the lives of my friends and i when we first saw it in the 90s. few music videos come close to it in terms of sheer power, brutality and brilliance. suffice to say i thanked him not just for myself but for all the people out there who i know would want me to do the same, given half a chance.
you can view the filmmaker labs press release?here.
if you’ve ever heard their cover of cheap trick’s song he’s a whore, you’ll know that both big black delta and war widow are bands to keep an eye on. both new, both from LA and both with singers called jon. now whilst we’ve been working with big black delta for some time now, war widow are pretty new to us. both bands share the same record label – coming home records – who have handled not just releases from a large amount of nine inch nails alumni, but of course also the magnificent mellowdrone. it was through coming home records that we got wind of some of the new tracks by war widow. the label’s boss erik andrews posted a couple of tracks on soundcloud one morning and i joined the others on twitter who follow the label’s feed, and gave them a listen over a hot cup of coffee.
tear it up (above) is the track that immediately grabbed me. the first thing that struck me was the dirgey feel of it. then when the dark + seedy lyrics filled my ears i started getting a range of very particular images dancing around in my brain. so i immediately looked to see if any artwork had been announced for this release. sure enough they had a record cover on their website. it was of a cat snarling. rich colours. very vibrant. it was tough, but it didn’t seem to mesh with the music i was hearing. so i quickly fired off an email to erik and asked if the artwork had been printed yet. he said it hadn’t. i then started ripping through various photographs i had lying around on hard drives and bookmarked on various sites, trying to find things that seemed to fit the music. i then put together a few designs using the bands logo and some of these images, and fired it off as quick as i could to erik. he amazingly passed them right onto the band and just moments later i got news that they were into trying a new cover and wanted to know what else we had up our sleeves.
i then emailed two people. first my friend?matt sundin, who took the photographs for the 65daysofstatic album cover,?we were exploding anyway. i briefed him quickly on the sorta images i was after and asked him if he had anything lying around. i then reached out across oceans into distant lands i’d never set foot in and contacted a ukrainian photographer who’s flickr account i’d been obsessed with for some time now. i felt his photos were utterly perfect for this and had in fact used some of them in the initial comps i sent to the band. this guy’s name is alex alekseenko, and you can see more of his work here.
knowing both would need some time i then told the band i’d need a day or so to pull things together and if they could hold off the printing presses for a moment, it’d be worth their while. they were cool with this.
the next morning i was elated to find an email from alex in my inbox. turns out he was 100% down with us using one of his photos for a record cover, particularly for a rock band. he himself was a collector of many records and was very excited at the prospect of having some of his work used in such a fashion. similarly matt also got back to me with a few shots of his own that he felt stepped into the murky conceptual arena i was after with this.
the images then started to speak for themselves. certain images coupled very well with others and those that didn’t lead me to ask if they could delve deeper – send me anything. i wanted them to send me the stuff they might even be scared to send through, because of the content of them. needless to say but we were all excited and definitely beginning to get that feeling again. that feeling that made you remember why you do this damn thing for a living.
pretty soon it was done. round 2 was off to the band and we were checking our emails regularly for anything back from them.
the band got back to us after a few days. they’d made a decision. they wanted the image you see above for the cover, and the image you see below for the backcover. we then started about ‘finishing up’ the design, which of course involved making it feel like you’d find the record in the damp corner of someone’s basement in the middle of nowhere.
if you’re into hearing the record, needless to say we highly recommend it. it will be out on 12 inch vinyl and was produced by none other than jonathan bates of big black delta. you can grab another song from the record from the band’s site here, or from the label’s site here.
we hope you enjoy it and that the artwork in some way helps you get deeper into the music.
we’ve just had it confirmed that the site we did for daft punk’s TRON: legacy score, tronsoundtrack.com, was javascript site of the month in the january issue of .net magazine. click here to read the full PDF including a short interview with us about the making of the site. huge thanks again to remy sharp, mr doob, topspin and disney for the hook-up!
it’s been about 4 years since we changed the way we present ourselves to people. it’s never been a huge deal to us, given we’ve never been hugely attracted to the idea of brands, fixed identities and the overall corporate approach to a company’s ‘personality’. in fact this time around we’ve dropped our previous ‘graphic’ logo, preferring instead to simply type our (v) out and produce a variation on it that echoes the kaomoji anime style emoticons, (v_i)
beyond this there are basically three key elements that governed this redesign. the first part was some kind of old library catagorization card that we found a scan of online.
for whatever reason the raw simplicity of it matched our desire to build a site that was stripped right down to the bare essentials. our portfolio was now strong enough to speak for itself, and some basic lettering on a paper surface like this made a lot of sense to us.
the second key part of the redesign came to us when designing our new business cards. our local printhouse cut us a deal for some super heavy stock letterpressed cards, so long as we limited ourselves to using one colour on one side. turning this to our advantage we created a design based on the black spot from treasure island. it tickled us to think that anyone we gave our card to might be considered guilty, or that their time for judgement has come.
the third part was this beautiful old japanese poster, again found online, that for one reason or another had haunted us. if anyone knows where we can get a copy of this poster, or even a higher resolution image of it, we’d be hugely grateful.
everything else you experience throughout the site are elements of our own creation or recreated from design blogs and experimental code projects around the internet. as stated before, the site is intended to take very much a back-seat to our work so it’s almost an exercise in harmonies rather than a lead melody of any sort.
we hope you find it non-intrusive when looking at our work, but also complimentary to the work.
