(v)
(v_i)
(version_industries)

the first time the work of louis CK really hit our radar was when we heard him ask the former US secretary of defense donald rumsfeld, live on US radio, if he was a lizard. it was a question he’d put forward just moments after suggesting that collectively rumsfeld and dick cheney (former US vice-president) were in fact lizards from outer space that eat human flesh. of course we had been casual fans before of louis’s work before, but it was this delicious moment that really turned our heads – the reason being that it reminded us hugely of the late great bill hicks, whose work has had a massive influence on our work at version industries.

we first met louis backstage at one of his recent shows in new york – the very same shows that became his most recent special, live at the beacon theater, which we have since been put in charge of releasing online. it was the gregory brothers who had recommended us for the job and after some initial phone calls and emails with louis’s management, we soon found ourselves sitting on couches opposite louis backstage at the beacon theater. louis was very clear on how he wanted to go about things and we initially served as a sounding board for his various ideas. we explained what each of his suggested directions would entail and what limitations, if any, he might face. he then told us that he was about to go on national television and not just announce the project, but also give the date it was to go live. there was not a second to lose.

in terms of design, it was a fairly low-profile job. louis made it clear after the first round of site designs we submitted that he wanted a less-flashy, more honest and trustworthy-feeling design. he knew this was mostly about people feeling safe about spending; up to this point his design aesthetic had been quite simple and raw, and he didn’t want to confuse people by straying too far from that. given this, we kept the red, black and white tones of his previous website but aimed for the more moody, atmospheric feeling design we felt best suited for viewing a film. we then proceeded to condense the content of the site right down to only that which people needed to “buy the thing” with. “buy the thing” was just one of the many wonderful colloquialisms louis asked that we use instead of the regular tone of language you tend to expect on an e-commerce site. our favourite of these was perhaps the naming schema he had us develop for when people forgot their passwords: try it yourself and you’ll likely end up with a new password of the likes of numbnuts.bjy5 or moron.abt3.

the coding for the site was a whole separate matter. this site was to be one of our greatest tests in this department due to the size of the video files, the importance of a frictionless purchase flow and the vast quantity of users we expected to hit the site both at launch and on a daily basis. as louis put it,

“i want people in prison to be able to get this.”

the site presented technical challenges in two primary ways: ease and scale. given the size and dedication of louis’s both national and international audience we decided that paypal, for its ubiquity and security, would be a reasonable place to start for payment processing. for the scalability of the app we chose to use amazon web services, tapping thomas chippendale of verran in england to manage and load-test the amazon infrastructure. in general AWS worked out extremely well – although after the opening weekend they gave us a wonderfully delicate call to ask if we were aware of the bandwidth bill the site had chalked up.

for the development of the application itself we chose the open-source fuelPHP framework. the application was simple in essence: manage accounts, stream the show, make the show available for download, and secure the files for paying fans. though we knew from the outset that piracy was inevitable, we wanted the paid, legitimate experience to be as easy as stealing. to lead development we enlisted the exceptional skills of longtime collaborator and friend jules janssen, whose understanding of the complexity of heavy traffic loads made him an obvious choice.

using the site, you’ll notice that we deliberately avoided forcing users to check an email account to complete the purchase – this was something louis insisted upon due to his own frustrations with waiting for validation emails in the past. therefore the purchase flow moves from “enter email address” to “pay with paypal” to “download”. no intermediary stages, no need to wait for an email address: you buy it, it’s yours. the site is intended to offer “one true path” to purchase, with no option to make the wrong decision or lack of clarity about what you’re supposed to be doing.

furthermore, bearing in mind the broad range of technical know-how and preference among louis’ fans, we built in html5 and ogg theora fallbacks for content to better serve the array of devices and platforms they use, and also out of respect to the free software community.

understanding full-well that this was one of the more high-profile jobs we’d taken on and that no matter how refined a system we’d built, we’d be taking not just a heavy server hit but also criticism from a number of online factions, we did not farm out the tech support but rather handled it personally. this meant we could have an open discourse with users who had specific ideas regarding improvements to the site. one particular email from richard stallman, founder of the free software foundation, recommending offering an anonymous payment system, served as an excellent reminder of the impact louis’s approach to this project was having on people. during the weekend the site went live, if you had had any reason to email the tech support team, you will have received a reply from either giles or myself, sitting as we were in his living room sipping cups of tea and drafting replies.

from meeting louis to delivery of the site was a period of approximately one month: designing and specifying the application, provisioning the amazon web services, developing, testing, go-live. we’ve since continued to provide tech support and handle a number of last minute updates to the site on louis’s whim. his ceaseless ambition for the scope of the project combined with a regular flow of ideas back and forth between his team, ours and the users via tech support, has meant the site continues to evolve and streamline itself in subtle ways. a couple of times louis would think of a way he wanted to expand the site’s scope and then demand it to be ready by the end of the next day for an appearance he was making on a talk show. this way he could announce the change on the broadest level possible and ensure the site was moving as fast as his brain was. this is what mr. scott must have felt like as chief engineering officer under captain kirk on the starship enterprise - the greater good being the stakes, the fundamental physical limitations of being human, the only thing in the way.

the question of how we’d approach the setup any differently now that we’ve learnt so much from the experience is an important one. our understanding of large scale file-serving concerns, of open-source fan interests and of just how frank you can and should be with internet users to appease their interests is now well-developed. in short, working on this project was utterly refreshing. louis’s “fuck you” approach to a massive scale sales platform, which we all know can be such a tedious process of trying to be overly accommodating and polite, appealed to our own design ethics massively and therefore continued to make this project a joy to work on. practically speaking, it allowed us to be all the more frank with users through the tech support system and ultimately get to the heart of each of their concerns much faster. when you’re allowed to talk freely about the fact that they can and will steal your product but would be happy to pay if we just set things up right, it helps you put together a better system. so long as everyone is being honest and no one feels like they’re being fucked over, worthwhile compromises are reached much faster. the slew of emails we’ve received from people stating that they’d never heard of louis before, but were buying the special simply because of his approach to selling it and the price he was selling it for, was heartwarming to say the least.

needless to say, if you haven’t yet watched louis CK – live at the beacon theater, you should. it’s very, very funny and largely because it’s honest, true and to the point – an approach that we believe has contributed hugely to every aspect of the success of this project. as of writing this article louis has made over 1 million dollars through the website and there’s an article in the new york times detailing his efforts in this regard. it’s important of course to not get carried away with the hype surrounding a project like this. louis was of course already well established and his success here is reflective of both that and the strong desire of internet users to support an attempt to reinvent the media business model. here’s something reggie watts said on the matter, soon after the site had gone live, that resonated with us in this regard -

“i’m so glad [the louis CK] experiment is working. however it is important to note that it is not a new concept nor that surprising that it is succeeding (thankfully). in fact it wasn’t even that big of a risk! the reason being common sense prevails. fans who love an artist want to see that artist succeed therefore if that artist invests energy, creates an experience and extends a generous hand directly to them, more often than not it will be met by an even greater positive return. this model has been pioneered by DIY, independent and some labeled artists of varying mediums over the last few decades to great success (recalling radiohead). i think what is most important about louis’ project is the nowness; it’s a much needed reminder for the entertainment industry and encouragement to other artists finding ways to navigate their crafts with creativity intact.”

we’ve certainly worked with companies like topspin for a while who’ve been making every effort they can to put the power of such a business model directly into the hands of artists. the main thing is to remember that you do now have the power to make the money you deserve yourself, so long as you have something people actually want, or rather, that is any good. the labels, publishers, film studios and television networks of the world used to be able to help you force-feed a turd into the mouths of fans whilst fanning your ego and quietly adjusting your image as best they could. these days you really have to make something outstanding because as we all know, it’s a “try now, pay later” market out there. so, when that masterpiece is finally ready, be excited that at the least you now have total control.

to accompany the release of 65daysofstatic’s new record, a rescoring of the 1972 science fiction film silent running, i have written a fairly in depth article that discusses the creation of the artwork. the article is the third in a series that i’ve written for the independent filmmaker project and you can read an excerpt of it here -

so a week passed, the hurricane was about to hit and i knew where i had to go with this. i chose not to run the idea by the band, mostly as I simply had no idea whether i could successfully pull it off any way. i’d never really drawn spaceships before and whilst i had an inkling of how i was going to do it, i truly expected a messy failure of some description to result from it. sitting down at my machine as people along the brooklyn waterfront were taping big Xs in their windows like hundreds of fox mulders with too many unanswered questions, i began to piece things together. all of the while i couldn’t stop repeating over and over what sara goldfarb says at the beginning of the film requiem for a dream, as her son is stealing her television to pay for drugs -

“this isn’t happening. and if it should be happening, it would be all right. so don’t worry, seymour. it’ll all work out. you’ll see already. in the end it’s all nice.”

by which i think my brain was saying that sometimes you have to trust there’s a reason for your motivations, because sometimes your subconscious is simply way ahead of you.

you can read the rest of the article here.

when 65daysofstatic were asked to write an article for issue 2 of underscore magazine, the magazine’s editors got in touch with us and asked that they might use some of the photographs we’d taken of the band whilst touring with them. we have since stayed in touch with the magazine, and were very kindly asked to pitch a story for issue 3, the fight issue.

we pitched three story ideas to them, one of which was a photo essay that i’d taken last christmas whilst visiting my grandparents in norfolk, england. they immediately took to the photos but asked that i accompany the shots with a small piece of writing, explaining my intentions with the shots. this soon developed into something much bigger than the intended couple of paragraphs, and swiftly started to take precedence as the driving force of the piece.

here’s excerpt from the essay -

at the end of the 1982 science fiction film blade runner, the replicant roy batty delivers a profound and lasting statement. he talks of the loss of experiences, memories and moments that occurs when someone dies. after all you certainly don’t just lose the person, you lose a completely unique perspective both on your life and the lives of countless others. an irreplaceable recording of details seemingly too obscure or trivial to write down or photograph.

quite how trivial is all relative of course. what of the tears no one saw quietly forming at the corner of the eyes that looked through the camera that photographed you being born? what of the rip in the dress on the person holding that camera, or the fight nine months before that caused that rip? the big scene. the making up. the kiss. the sex. trivial to some, but probably not to you.

you can read the rest of the essay here, and you can see the original set of photographs i took here.

nothing will compare to buying the issue, of course. this magazine is always has great articles, is printed on really nice paper stock and the overall design is pretty much impeccable. if you dig this sorta thing, by all means grab yourself a copy here.

the website for the feature film PAVILION went live today, and along with it my second blog article for the IFP in which i discuss the process that went into making the site. we were also fortunate enough to be asked to handle the film’s posters and the credit sequences. the article discusses this and explains why our treatment on all fronts aimed to reflect the very minimal, atmospheric nature of the film.

here’s an excerpt -

my co-worker zach referred me once to a film (portrait of jason, 1967) where a man is sitting there smoking a cigarette for pretty much the entire film. that’s it. talking about this on the way to get lunch one day we agreed that in a film like that, where that’s all that happens, the small things turn into huge events. zach then stopped, scratched his head and thought for a moment, whispering to the air in front of him, “what was it that happened in that one…”. i stopped too, waited, and then finally he said “ah yes, he ran out of gas on his lighter. huge deal!” we both laughed and then stepped inside jimmy’s, our regular lunch joint.

so to reiterate, pavilion really is one of those exact films. it’s almost fair to say that if you blink or cough, you could miss the entire ‘reveal’ at the end of it. there are tiny fragmented shards of dialogue that tell you what’s happening whilst all the while you’re watching the most detached, beautiful and mesmerizing footage of kids feeling out the moments in those long, long, useless days of our youth. in fact what i said when i came back from the bathroom after tim had screened his movie for us was ‘congratulations’. congratulations for capturing that feeling of the abstract, aimless ennui of what it was to be young, with almost no sense of responsibility at all.

you can read the rest of the article here.

the above cover of the new big black delta album has existed in one form or another for a year or more. aside from the protomen act II logo, this is the longest we’ve had to sit on something and let it mature. it has therefore had to suffer being discarded a few times and consequently being heaved back onto the table for repair. this is largely because we were nervous and didn’t trust that the visual came close to the power of the music. thus we kept searching for a way to express that, and consequently found ourselves staring at this piece again and again, realizing it was the closest we’d ever come.

the idea behind this cover was essentially two-fold -

first up whilst the EP depicted elements passing through space toward something, the LP we felt should be emblematic of the place they were all headed – the core or nucleus sucking everything in. this way we had a story of sorts, both visually and conceptually. conceptually because, as with most EPs, the songs were tested out and then some found their final resting place on the LP.

secondly we wanted something that gave you the sense of being in a minute, inner-space, just as much as the more obvious, vast, outer-space setting the artwork appeared to depict at first glance. we wanted it to feel like the genesis of an idea, or the microscopic core of the beginnings of an erruption, as much as a planetoid or huge cataclysm in space. you see we were into the idea that jonathan bates’ first band, mellowdrone, had had an album cover with a man clutching his head as it exploded, and that subsequently this record was perhaps illustrating the inside of that same head. the nucleus of the eruption, be it psychological or physical, that lead to the head exploding. the assumption being that both images, for us, represented the state the band was in, the lyrics and the overall tone.

whilst big black delta is very much a more personal, solo musical endeavor for jon, mellowdrone saw him very much more in a band environment, in more of a democracy and also dealing with a sense of disenfranchisement. so the angry bear album cover was an external view of the result of a certain psychology, and the BBDLP1 cover is a depiction therefore, also, of something more personal, from somewhere more unique to just jon.

beyond the hand-drawn elements themselves the cover was also treated with a level of distressing and texture. the reason for this is that the music itself was treated in a similar fashion. jon deliberately kept certain glitches and errors that happened in the processing or compression of each track in order to give it a more freeform and ‘fuck it’ attitude. so in turn we effectively threw the record on the floor at a UFO convention and let everyone stampede across it as they made their way from bob lazar’s talk on alien spaceship reverse engineering over to the preview screenings of the next series of ancient aliens.

so what next? well jon is of course working on new music and we’re already working on new artwork. as jim carroll says in the basketball diaries “come on, reggie, you know this game never ends.”

stay tuned.

our talk at the IFP labs in tribeca, new york yielded some unexpected but very welcome results – several film makers approached us to assist them with ways to promote their films. one of the first was writer / director and actor ryan o’nan. he was about to send his new film the brooklyn brothers beat the best to the toronto film festival. the above poster is one of a few elements we worked work him and his production team to put together for the festival.

the film is ryan’s ode to john hughes trains, planes and automobiles (and stars some classic 80s movie alumni) and we created a poster to try to reflect that whilst offering it’s own more beat-up, make-shift aesthetic. it’s the story of a lovelorn musician trying to get a band together and perhaps rekindle a little self-respect along the way. due to these musical themes within the film we also helped design a series of other elements which will be revealed by the film’s production team along the way.

this is our first proper feature film poster and we’re very excited and thankful to have been ushered into this new world by such great and talented people. speaking of which, we should also add that the film also stars ‘tappy’ from requiem for a dream, ‘kevin’ from st. elmo’s fire and ‘keoki’ from party monster. if you know who those characters are then you’ll be as stoked as we were to see it for the first time. needless to say, working with ryan and his team has been a real pleasure and a great learning experience and we’re excited to say that we are already hard at work on posters for another film. stay tuned for the fruits of those labours soon.

working with makeup and vanity set continues to be a very exciting, fluid and rewarding process. we will never take for granted the fact that we get to work so directly with such an exciting, cinematically driven collective of musicians down there in nashville, tennessee. MAVS and the protomen continue to challenge and inspire, and this project was no different.

that said, when MAVS first approached us for this project we had a lot going on and so he was forced to go elsewhere. however when that didn’t pan out as planned, he offered us another shot at it. by this point we’d had a chance to listen to the record a great deal and lament on the fact that the job was no longer ours. this of course meant that the moment we got given the reins again everything came together very quickly. the work was done in 2-3 days and proved to be a rather cathartic and emotional experience for all involved. both MAVS and i had been through intense personal experiences around this time and listening to the record now whilst looking at the cover, it clearly expresses both of our desires to keep searching for an answer no matter how dark things got.

beyond the obvious emotional understanding, we’d been informed that it was to be a cassette only release and that MAVS was keen to echo a visual from the VHS era of home entertainment. old enough to have lived through a great portion of the VHS and cassette era, we understood how this record would sound when fans heard it and very much where it was coming from in terms of cinematic narrative. the decision to in some way make it photographic and involve some sort of backlit misty scene came very quickly, and was undeniably influenced by our shared love for shows from that era like twin peaks and the x-files. so it was then a matter of building that out with a combination of photographic elements and a series of photoshop brushes and textures. finally, the typography came about as a result of wanting something elegant and not too cliché, but that would also feel a little like film credits.

it goes without saying but we can’t express just how fantastic the music is on this record. it’s powerfully cinematic and takes you back into a world made mysterious by not just the technologies used to create and record it, but also by the melodies and the concepts behind them.

stream the record here and by all means buy a copy of if you dig it. it’s only $6 on mp3, or $15 if you want the cassette version.

once again we could not be more grateful to topspin. they have put us in touch with an eclectic range of radical artists with whom we’ve had the most exciting and rewarding relationships. the gregory brothers, better known as the auto-tune the news guys, are no exception. a month or so ago they walked into our studio and told us they needed a new website. they then hit the road and we sent them our ideas as they criss-crossed the country on the youtube tour. the trick was to combine their already burgeoning aesthetic with a number of new levels of functionality. their old site had been pretty much built entirely by them using dreamweaver and they were understandably into something that would be a little easier to update. needless to say, but the process was a breeze and often funny too.

as the project went on we of course became more and more familiar with their work. aside from the classic auto-tune videos that we’ve all seen, it was very apparent that they were a talented 4 piece band in their own right. not only are they capable of making a hilarious youtube videos but they’ve got an album’s worth of solid, self-proclaimed folk ‘n’ roll jams. hit up the music store on the new site to check some of them out. they just got back from playing bonnaroo festival and i’m sure will be announcing more tour dates soon. seriously, go. they’re fantastic people and their show is seriously unique.

gregorybrothers.com

a couple months back alessandro cortini pushed the button on the sequel to his experimental synth project sonoio. he’d finished a rough version of the album and was keen to get some ideas for the artwork rolling. the first record’s aesthetic had been based around the colour blue, and we’d known for a while that this record was likely to be coloured, and called, red. in fact there was already a version of the album cover from the original design sessions that had been cast in red and he’d been using for his demo mp3s. however once we’d heard the record and fallen under its spell (it is even better than the original), we knew a new cover was needed. something that felt more involved, continued the abstract character based narrative of the first cover and took it into a new realm of introspection, if you will.

we’d also already developed the blue cover in a number of directions for the remix album that came soon after it, and so realized there was space there to keep telling the story in a fashion we felt true to the new material. it took a while to stumble across something that still felt immediately connected to the first cover, whilst offering a fresh angle on things. the resulting piece is of course deliberately open to interpretation, but features our white and black characters again, now in different circumstances and states of repair. we also started to pad out the design with more intricate textures and new colours, as the new album felt like a development and growth musically in such a way that the artwork had to follow suit.

then there’s this music video for enough, as seen at the top of this post.

for a long time my close friend and collaborator, the director / photographer matt sundin, and i have been talking about making videos, and eventually films, together. in fact it was this desire that made the 65daysofstatic we were exploding anyway album cover turn out the way it did. so the moment alessandro proposed a video, i gave him a call and said ‘this is our chance’.

alessandro was considering making 2-3 of the new songs into videos and wanted our ideas for each. ultimately he felt that the ‘live performance’ pitch that we included was the one that felt truest to where he was with this project right now. so matt called his crew together and asked that i start to write down a list of ideas for shots for the video. so i took an evening, put the song on repeat and worked on shot ideas that i felt would embellish the music visually and give the production a quality that had some level of character. you know, above and beyond what you usually get with these things.

we then booked a studio in green point, brooklyn and alessandro flew out from LA. the next day we hit the ground running.

matt and his gaffer / assistant craig ward had pulled together some fantastic elements, including a wild array of lighting options and a carpenter to build a small but unusually surfaced stage for alessandro to perform on. we then painted everything else in the room black and setup our dolly / tracking rig. so far everything was going well, heck there were even 2 cats wandering around the studio which proved more than enough to keep alessandro entertained between takes.

the only sad moment was when the two vintage television sets that alessandro had used for his live performances in LA arrived via post all cracked and broken inside their box. we tried our best to make them work, but it wasn’t happening.

pushing on we proceeded to do take after take of alessandro performing the song from every angle we could, taking care to include shots with him not on the stage too for some fun and games later in the editing room. it was a pretty intense process but the footage was clearly looking solid from the outset. plus the more the song got played over the studio speakers the more everyone involved started to dance a bit too, and dancing never hurt anyone.

the shoot ended pretty late into the night and the studio owner offered to keep our stage setup for some cabaret / performance art style shoot he had going on later, involving strippers and wild animals. i could have mis-remembered that though. we then headed back to matt’s apartment for the wrap-party and alessandro headed back to LA the next day.

a week or two later the intense process of editing began. matt went through the footage and started pulling together the best stuff from the vast array of material we had. soon after that he was putting together a great rough cut of things and sent this to me so that i could cut together the teaser clip that went live a couple weeks ago. he then did another cut and passed it over to me again. we agreed that what there was already felt good and exciting, but tended to get a little tiring after a while, as it all had a very similar tone. so we consciously divided the song up into 4-5 parts and attempted to address each section with a different mindset, in terms of editing. i was then left to re-imagine the intro to the video and the electronic breakdown after the verses and choruses – the part with all the ‘oh oh ohs’. sending this back to matt lead us to more talks, further edits and the delivery of the first rough cut to alessandro.

alessandro was very excited by what we gave him and made a series of notes regarding various tonal changes he was after and what he felt, due to the nature of where his head was at with the song, needed adjusting in terms of shots used for certain lyrics. in this way several cuts were sent back and forth between new york and los angeles and then just last sunday we got a thumbs up from alessandro. matt then sat down and worked his magic on the footage, grading it to give it the warm, grainy, contrasty feel you see in the final cut. it was that final lick of varnish that properly started to give us the shivers. the thing was done, we were flat out of time and there was nothing we could do but send it off.

none of us could be happier with the response to the video. you just never know if you’re going insane in that editing suite. many days in the dark with breaks at strange hours for food or beer, and then back into the darkness. hearing the song a thousand times over to the point where it’s just noises and everything in your head is tied to its ebb and flow. it gets a bit bewildering. so much so that at one point we did an edit of the video laced with eerie footage of cats that we’d shot at matt’s girlfriend’s apartment nearby. inspired as we were by the cats that had been on set throughout the shoot, and often leapt onto the stage right into the shot. of course the ‘cat cut’ really didn’t work but we felt we had to try everything just to be sure, haha.  so yeah, thanks and thanks again.

the sonoio project is going from strength to strength at this point and we’re very fortunate and grateful to be a part of it.

feels like an age since we made a new website. very happy that this is the one we make a small come-back with. frock is a new york-based women’s vintage clothing store. we built this site using wordpress and shopify. both truly excellent and affordable platforms for building easy to use websites for clients. shopify in particular is a new discovery for us and we’re all about it now. so thanks to whoever put it in front of us. we can’t remember who that was sadly. thanks also to lexi + evan who run frock and are awesome to work with.

the site itself was, believe it or not, inspired by the robert palmer video for addicted to love.

trivia – these guys just outfitted the cast of men in black 3.
fact – you should probably tell your girlfriend about this website.