(v)
(v_i)
(version_industries)

i’ve just handed in my latest article for the IFP. in essence it’s a piece that questions how easy it is to assess the quality of a film (or any work of art) in an age where hype is everything. the article starts out with a proposed set of rules and then attempts to qualify them. these rules are as follows -

rule 1. (to kill expectation)

go into the film without having read or watched anything. trailers are acceptable, as they are sometimes created by film directors themselves, though even that sometimes is questionable.

rule 2. (to kill projection)

assess what the film is trying to say or achieve within the realm of what kind of movie it is trying to be. do not project your own expectations. let the film dictate the level of expectation, be that tonally, narratively or conceptually.

then, assess how well you think the film reaches whatever goals it set out to achieve.

rule 3. (to kill hype)

don’t talk about the film with anyone who has not seen it, except if you’re encouraging them to go see it. only discuss the film with those that have seen it, and discuss it hard. that’s what it’s there for.

you can read the rest of the article here.

we’d like to thank gus mantel for allowing us to use his incredible animated gifs to illustrate the piece. you can view more of his work here.

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.

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.

caspar has been invited to write a monthly blog for the independent film project. the first article went live on monday and it’s on the subject of trust. here is an excerpt -

in terms of the work i do for version industries, i have a healthy obsession with narrative and pathos, and feel that one should inherently lead to the other if you’re going to win the trust of your audience, whatever the medium. for this very reason i try wherever possible to tell a story with each project, be it a website, a record cover, a poster or a music video. i don’t mean a ‘story’ in the ‘fashion magazine’ sense, i mean a story with characters, scenes, events and climaxes. now of course it doesn’t have to be a sad story to be a good story, but without a sense of pathos somewhere along the line, you won’t glean any real loyalty for your work. take the funniest film you’ve ever seen and there’ll be a moment of sadness sitting right at the heart of it, and whether you like it or not it’s that moment that grounds everything else. why? because sadness feels more true than happiness. we might only recollect the happy memories and we certainly don’t have much memory of pain, but it’s a fact that it’s the sad moments that help us lower our defenses, bring us together and help us trust each other. trust being fundamental if you are an artist trying to earn the respect of your peers and garner support from your audience. it’s trust that leads them to follow your progress and consequently support for your next piece of work, be that financially or other.

you can read the rest of the article here.

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 while back we were asked by loft publications in barcelona, spain, to have some of our work featured in a web design handbook that they were putting together. the book is now out and available from amazon here.

a huge thanks to paz diman and all at loft publications for the invitation. we’re very honoured.