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caspar had long been bothered with how badly daft punk had executed the cover artwork for their final album, random access memories. despite having access to their own helmets to photograph, they made a poor computer rendering of them instead. now, since the protomen had often referred to themselves as "a southern, buck-toothed daft punk", it felt right to finally set the record straight. we shipped their smashed-up, 20 year old helmets to joey ciccoline and he set about photographing them in the appropriate manner.

if you have the means to make it to the show we do recommend it. the protomen are, despite the tongue-in-cheek daft punk reference here, one of the most unique and extraordinary live bands in existence today. 

caspar made the wild light artwork digitally in 2012/13 using adobe's illustrator (shapes) and photoshop (textures and type). going back into the files and hauling something poster-worthy from the wreckage was rewarding. not least because there were some intricate pieces in there that were never used in the record's original packaging and promotional materials. the strange life-form you see here being one of them.

the posters were made using a printer and a scanner. the manual elongation of the images, to us, spoke to the themes jon wanted us to explore.

we collaborated once again with john delucca on the poster design.

the cover up is likely just the first in a series of exceptionally well recorded collections of cover songs from the band. needless to say it was our job to create artwork for the record that deliberately wove it into the protomen's overall narrative arc. this included nothing less than asking friends to voice characters in the various "movie scenes" dotted throughout the recording.

the idea here was to make a movie soundtrack to a film that was made and exists within the protomen's ongoing story. in doing so we asked john delucca that he might once again bless us with his exceptional drawning and painting talents. caspar and commander then sewed everything together to make a vinyl record release we're very proud of.

we hope you enjoy the work.

john was sent a few paragraphs detailing the narrative behind each album. he then started to create a poster that we could divide into three halves, to represent the three parts of the story.

we were asked to create the logo, cover and overall packaging for the record. the logo we made is pretty self-explanatory, but the packaging was a subtler affair. utilizing the bokeh affect often seen in films when the camera is focussing on objects in the foreground, we realized we could represent each part of the trilogy with a different coloured circle. in this way the cover image could say a lot with very little, and each record within the packaging could be differentiated by its own red, blue or brown graphic.

joey was then sent the logo and proceeded to shoot the necessary footage to create the teaser trailer for the trilogy, this clip was the first promotional piece released to the general public. once released the limited edition box set sold out in 2 days, but you can still purchase the album digitally here.

fortunately MAVS then had the idea to do a parallel release in the form of a limited edition VHS cassette and poster. this would then come out later than the official film artwork, and give the original pieces we created a place to live. a tangent universe if you will.

you can see photos of the VHS tape here.

paul wolinski is one quarter of the experimental musical machine that is 65daysofstatic. polinski is his more purely electronic side-project.  the discussions for how to handle the artwork for the album started years before the record was even a twinkle in his eye. we'd talked at length for years about films, musics, books, games and designs that appeal to us for whatever reason. whether it be the books of jeff noon or the cassette loading games of sinclair ZX spectrum, there was an innate understanding of what this solo project would demand in terms of artwork the moment the demos started to come together.

the final artwork started with us coming up with a story that would capture paul's feelings about various things and how he wanted to translated those into a science fiction tale of some kind. the next step was padding that story out with various touchstone visual elements and then translating those into a series of panels that we could use for the album and any singles. the first image we put together turned out to be the album cover as it is now, and this went onto influence paul's approach to making the music. he then sent us more demos that inspired the creation of more panels, and so the back and forth went until we had enough to illustrate the story / world we had created.

you can read more about making the artwork + video here.

once again we asked john delucca to bring his magic to the project. first he painted the fantastic streets of fire inspired cover, and then went on to create various other pieces for the album's illustrated "libretto" booklet. caspar then wove everything together for the 2009 compact disc release of the album, and the promo "movie poster" that went with it.

in 2018 it was time to release a deluxe, vinyl version of the album. for this the band wanted to make a book with a pop-up diorama of john's "how the world fell under darkness" illustration as the centrepiece. this time around caspar eschewed the rest of the CD artwork and replaced it with stills from the recently shot and released light up the night music video.