My favourite 'new' artist of 2010: Chilly Gonzales. I place 'new' in inverted commas because he's actually been releasing music for 15 years. He recently admitted he loves playing the role of the washed up retired entertainer, but since his 'Pianist Envy' mixtape was dropped on blogs such as Busy P's, his notoriety has shot up.
I saw Chilly play in Victoria Park at the one day festival Field Day and it was the highlight of a very good line-up. He rapped, he played piano with his feet, he pulled a groupie up on stage, he covered Daft Punk, Boys Noize and Erol Alkan acoustically, and he smashed a white guitar after ranting about respect for instruments! All in his dressing gown! That is what I call entertainment.
On September 14th he will release an album named Ivory Tower, packed full of "dark, gritty cabaret". A feature film will accompany the record also by the same title. A single called 'I Am Europe' has already been released, with a video showing clips from his film, in which he plays a pair of competitive chess playing brothers alongside Tiga.
Pervasive Media Studio was set up in February 2008 in Bristol as a hub of innovation and collaboration. After doing a work placement at the studio I was commissioned to design the studio a showreel.
What was the brief?
After two and a half successful years, the studio were still having to take ten minutes out of every workshop and meeting to explain to people what the studio actually was and what they do. What they wanted was a fast-cut, energetic film to showcase the projects the PMstudio had worked on and supported. They had case studies of individual projects, but needed to be able to show the breadth and range of the studio's capabilities.
What did I do?
I designed a graphic script to give the showreel a clear branding and narrative; writing and rewriting the copy to define the true ethos of the studio. One of the issues I had realised was that much of the pervasive media was either on small mobile devices or as layered audio - they had a lot of footage was just people walking around looking at mobiles or listening to headphones. I needed to make the pervasive media visible so I used the graphics I had designed to represent it, motion-tracking it some of the shots. I also used the graphics to tackle the problem that some of their projects had been filmed at 4:3 rather than widescreen.
As the studio is made up of lots of small start-ups and artists, the project work was scattered everywhere. I noted the range of projects and collated the footage over several weeks before editing with the final graphics.
Check out the final cut here:
So what happened in the end?
The showreel was launched in the Watershed cinema in Bristol and now Pervasive Media Studio have the video up on the homepage of their website and use it frequently along with the artwork as promotional material.
