“this was a very typical time. i was single. all you needed was a cup of tea, a light, and your stereo, you know, and that’s what i had.”
steve, at home, 1982.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
this is something new we’ve been working on with SONOIO. stay tuned.