• Lo-fi magic – the video for Sour’s ‘Hibi No Neiro’

  2nd July 09

  Posted by Ben Malbon

  Posted in Uncategorized

  It’s turning into an unexpected week of musical delights here at BBH Labs. After the success of BBH New York’s work on the new Oasis LP launch, awarded Titanium at Cannes last weekend, comes something equally close to home.

  Just launched today is some work for the band Sour, directed and produced by Hal Kirkland, Masa Kawamura (BBH New York), & their buddies Magico Nakamura & Masayoshi Nakamura.

  

  We caught up with Hal & Masa (in between all their awesome work on paying client briefs) & they explained how the project came together. We we’re particularly struck by the challenge of starting with a budget of $0. Makes you think differently.

  The project initially had a few challenges. The first was the nonexistent budget. The second involved the inability of the directors to film the band members LIVE, due to the band living in Tokyo and the Directors living in New York. On top of this they had their day jobs at BBH to contend with.

  Rather than hinder the ideas, this ironically provided the framework from which the idea was born. Webcams as a medium were chosen because these days everyone has seems to have one. Sour also had a relatively strong fan base that paid constant visits to their fan site.

  A message was sent out from there to ask fans to volunteer for the new music video. The production was inundated with responses from people all over the world the most surprising being a fan from a small town in Portugal.

  The next few months were spent choreographing the performance. This was primarily done by the directors literally acting out and filming every part themselves so as to a detailed animatic, that in-turn would make it easier for their friends online to follow.

  Once that was buttoned down the filming of over 80 people began. The directors wanted the action to be created from timed choreography to give it a more realistic feel and to make it more human. Relying on editing alone would have taken away the charm and from the spectacle of the coordination of so many individuals.

  In case you’re curious, the song is about discovering your own color or voice in this world. It speaks of embracing your individuality in order to embrace what the rest of the world has to offer. So the use of the webcam and the idea of capturing people’s individual expressions as they collaborate to make a greater whole, made a lot of sense. We love it – the perfect way to start a long, sunny Independence Day weekend.

  About Sour

  Sour is a Japanese post-rock band formed in spring 2002 by hoshijima (gut guitar/voice), Sohey (eub/bass), KENNNNN (drums/toys). They have released 3 albums to date, and the track used in this video is called ‘Hibi no Neiro (Tone of Everyday)’ which is the lead single to their first mini album ‘Water Flavor EP’ released on July 24 2009. For more information about the band, please visit their website: http://sour-web.com/

  Here are some previous music videos that Hal & Masa have done for them:
  ‘Hangetsu (Half Moon)’: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMGSH0J0dUU
  ‘Omokage no Saki (Beyond your memory)’: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vVWb1M_rQk

  Contact
  Masa Kawamura – mercyk1015@gmail.com
  Hal Kirkland – halkirkland@yahoo.co.uk
  Magico Nakamura – magicobullet@gmail.com
  Masayoshi Nakamura

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• Music : data : flash : literature : interactivity : art : magic : awesome

  30th June 09

  Posted by Ben Malbon

  Posted in creativity, design, interactive, music

  Without doubt our find of the week (the year?) here at BBH Labs has been this staggeringly cool flash application, from a Singapore-based band called Concave Scream. I’d never heard of them, and now I can’t stop listening to them.

  

  Created as a piece of marketing content for their new LP, ‘Soundtrack for a Book’, it consists of data visualizations of the front covers of 50 all-time classic books (think Moby Dick, Alice, Pollyanna, Last of the Mohicans), brought to life and mashed-up with the soundtracks from the new LP.

  It is completely customizable & interactive. Each of the 50 books can be played with using controls at top right. You can add or accentuate colours, change rotation speed, create wallpapers, or simply opt for a more randomized effect. Go full screen for best effects (top right).

  In a week when smart new ways to launch music have been recognized and awarded (for example, close to home, BBH NY’s launch of the new Oasis LP, a Titanium Lion winner in Cannes), this takes that to another level.

  We’re certainly guilty of getting over-excited fairly frequently here at BBH Labs, but this is genuinely staggeringly good. Best of all, it’s utterly beautiful in a mesmerizing way, with the vocal-less music from the LP completely complementing the visuals.

  The actual CD itself is a fairly well-designed piece of work too (see below).

  

  Go play.

  “[Concave Scream] have a lot of naïve aggression and a dirty kind of
  sound, which I think makes them a lot more credible than the other pop
  acts which seem to be singing just for the sake of singing, with no real
  point of view.”

  - Malcolm McClaren, The Straits Times

  For more info: www.concavescream.com
  Email us at: info@concavescream.com

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• Less, But Better – an interview with design legend Dieter Rams

  29th June 09

  Posted by Ben Malbon

  Posted in culture, design, process

  “Good designers must always be avant-gardists, always one step ahead of the times. They should – and must – question everything generally thought to be obvious. They must have an intuition for people’s changing attitudes. For the reality in which they live, for their dreams, their desires, their worries, their needs, their living habits. They must also be able to assess realistically the opportunities and bounds of technology.”

  (Dieter Rams, 1980 speech to Braun supervisory board, from his Design Museum profile)

  There can’t be many more legendary & respected designers around today than Dieter Rams. For over 50 years Rams has been one of the most influential industrial designers around, producing elegant, stripped-down and flawlessly balanced everyday objects in such enduring forms that one is hard-pressed to identify a design of his that hasn’t stood the test of time.

  

  Electric shaver, 1970; Control ET44 calculator, 1978; LE1 loudspeaker, 1960. All Braun.

  In fact, if you own an iPod, iPhone, or iMac you almost certainly owe thanks to Dieter Rams for some of the look, feel and simplicity of these products. His influence is explicit in the work of Jonathan Ive at Apple, most literally, perhaps, in the design of the calculator on the iPhone, but in fact across almost the entire range of Apple products.

  

  The influence of Rams on Jonathan Ive at Apple is profound (image: Jesus Diaz)

  (For more, including Q&A with Rams, click below)

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• “Sharing is the essence of creation”

  24th June 09

  Posted by Ben Malbon

  Posted in crowdsourcing, culture, transformational change

  Wow, are we looking forward to seeing this film in full.

  “RiP: A Remix Manifesto” – a film about remix and copyright culture. It explores copyright issues in the information age, where the media landscape is being profoundly transformed, and the distinction between producers and consumers is becoming blurred, to say the least.

  This is the trailer and it’s uplifting, provocative, challenging and inspiring, all at the same time. Full of complex debates and clearly coming with a strong point of view on how those debates might be – must be – resolved (so not everyone will agree with this, by any means, but heh, that’s good right?).

  

  Features contributions from Gilberto Gil, Laurence Lessig, Cory Doctorow, and many more. We’re particularly looking forward to seeing the awesome Lessig in action again: “There is no way to kill this technology, we can only criminalize its use” – Laurence Lessig.

  Download the film in full, paying what you think it’s worth: http://www.ripremix.com/

  Check their blog: http://www3.nfb.ca/webextension/rip-a-remix-manifesto/

  Follow them on Twitter: http://twitter.com/remixmanifesto
  

  (Thanks to Marc Schiller – @marcdschiller – for the heads up)

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• Bring the noise: making music with the masses

  17th June 09

  Posted by Ben Malbon

  Posted in creativity, crowdsourcing, music

  We have been playing with this really impressive collaborative & spoken word tool, Bb 2.0, and melting our brains thinking about the possibilities, and where this could go next

  Conceived by Darren Solomon, from Science for Girls, but with plenty of help from users, the tool is based around the insight that it’s possibly to play multiple videos on YouTube simultaneously. It’s similar to, but according to Darren pre-dates, the Kutiman YouTube mash-up videos (which are also awesome pieces of remixed art).

  

  Darren & team go into the why and how in more detail in their FAQ, which are worth checking out. It’s an interesting experiment around using the crowd to conceive of and produce music, but one critical element stands out for us – the role of Darren as both editor (he filters and selects all the music chosen) and overall creative director (his vision, his direction, his imagination). In debates around the use of the crowd – in this case the musical talents of the crowd – the pivotal role of the editorial director is frequently overlooked. In a crowdsourced world the role of the ‘creative’ is more important than ever.

  http://inbflat.net/

  Thanks to @aaronkoblin for the tip off; his own version (kind of) of this is of course his pretty brilliant ‘Bicycle built for two thousand’ project.

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• Information needs architecture, but they’re not the same thing

  13th June 09

  Posted by Ben Malbon

  Posted in design, interactive

  Slightly spooky voiceover (always unnerving to have recorded ‘live’ pauses thrown in), but we’re enjoying the simplicity of these pieces about information architecture, stripped down to the bare essentials, and split into a piece on architecture and another on information. Cool animation too.

  http://www.vimeo.com/3248803 http://www.vimeo.com/3248432

  From MAYA Design in Pittsburgh. And here’s how they talk about the nature of information architecture.

  “By thinking about the architecture of how information is used, how it flows, and how it fits within the user’s world (its context), you can capture the essence of how to build a system that is not only intuitive but futureproof.”

  Thanks to @daveElf for drawing it to our attention.

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• Music making for the talentless

  10th June 09

  Posted by Ben Malbon

  Posted in Uncategorized

  We’re into this at the moment – http://bit.ly/68ypk
  

  A super simple but very cool sinewave synthesizer. From the Laboratory of Andre Michelle – http://bit.ly/1iBh8

  It’s remarkable, and a little scary, how even completely talentless people like us can produce something that sounds semi-musical in about 60 seconds.

  

  When you eventually reach the limits of your talent, here are four rather more skilled proponents of the synth cranking it out in a remarkable & massively cheesy video from 1985.

  

  Enjoy.

  And thanks to @fittedsweats for the recommendation.

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• Note to Self: Stop Making Sense

  4th June 09

  Posted by Adam Glickman

  Posted in creativity, culture, design, music

  This is simply a note of appreciation to David Byrne, who continues to remind me that interesting ideas don’t always require explanation and that great success can occur from the oddest of experiments.

  Byrne doesn’t simply make music. He also designs chairs:

  

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• Marketing Mashup

  2nd June 09

  Posted by Mel Exon

  Posted in creativity, culture

  “I love fools’ experiments.  I am always making them”
  Charles Darwin, 1809-1882

  

  Universal logo for mashups, concept by Zohar Manor-Abel, criticalflare.com

  Brokeback to the Future. Must Like Jaws. Google Maps with just about anything. Danger Mouse’s the Grey Album. We just can’t escape mashups. When the very last music track, piece of software, data or film has been spliced with something else to create another new hybrid output, perhaps then, and only then, will the world rest easy.

  Or maybe it shouldn’t.  We could look at consumer-orientated mashup culture as just the start of something with even broader application. Taken to an extreme, I’m talking about mashing up entire industries. The marriage or mutation of skill sets inside an industry like marketing & communications, with those on the outside. The sole purpose of the experiment to devise radically new, hybrid forms of creativity.

  Industries as diverse as architecture, astrophysics, poetry and genetic engineering are already showing us how it’s done, collaborating and cross-fertilising with each other to evolve.  A BBC podcast not so long ago explored this whole area with almost Darwinian alacrity, a guest on the show summing up his take as follows:

  “How do we produce original knowledge? …We no longer need specialist knowledge, but trans-disciplinary creative solutions.”
  Andy Miah, editor of ‘Human Futures: Art in an Age of Uncertainty’

  The implications for creative businesses seem particularly significant. Despite the pride the communications industry has taken historically in its ability to seek inspiration from far & wide, it’s undeniable that large chunks of it currently maintain a pretty insular, closed off existence.

  Consider this then a rallying cry to break down the walls, take a step outside and embrace the new forms of creativity that lie waiting for us at the intersections with fields, disciplines & cultures different to our own.

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  Tags:

  behaviours, inter-industry, mashup
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• Getting comfortable with chaos

  30th May 09

  Posted by Ben Malbon

  Posted in creativity, culture

  Posted by Ben Malbon & Heidi Hackemer

  I’ve just finished an awesome article in ‘New York’ magazine by Sam Anderson called ‘In Defense of Distraction‘. I say finished. I mean barely finished. I’ve been reading it for four days.

  

  Illustration by Glen Cummings/MTWTF (Photo: John Day/Getty Images)

  The truth is, it took me waaaaay too long to read the piece. Not because it’s not a really top quality dissection of the attention crash, its causes, and ramifications – it is – but because almost every sentence I read contained a phrase, name, concept or idea that I wanted to get more information about. I barely finished a single sentence in one go.  I spent more time on Google than on the New York magazine site.

  My colleague Heidi (@uberblond) also took a crack at it. In her desperate attempt to not meander off into conceptual undergrowth, she opened a new tab with a Google search every time a thought hit her. At the end of the article, she had racked up almost twenty tabs of where her mind wanted to go. It turned out we both struggled to finish what is a really excellent, highly readable article on a subject we’re both really into. Not good. Some would say pathetic.

  In Anderson’s piece, David Meyer, one of the world’s leading experts on multitasking & cognition describes this phenomenon in bald, almost harrowing terms. He sees our distraction “as a full-blown epidemic—a cognitive plague that has the potential to wipe out an entire generation of focused and productive thought.”

  This struck a chord with us, although we were both barely paying enough attention to the piece first time around to register the thought. Only when we compared notes did we recall skim-reading that quote as our bit-addled brains struggled to process thousands of concurrent potential search terms at once. Our mutually pathetic attempt at pointed concentration got both of us thinking: if two averagely-smart people can barely concentrate on something that *really* interests us, what does that mean about our ability to think creatively? Hmmmm . . .

  

  Image by Kevin Dooley, Flickr (CC)

  Well we haven’t got any smart answers to that one, but fortunately, as we both took so long to finish the piece, in the meantime something on this theme snuck in and offered an interesting counter-argument. A recent piece in Wired magazine by David Allen, ‘How to be creative amid chaos‘, proposes using the disordered reality of over-stimulation, continuous partial attention and multi-tasking as a liberating force that can feed, not stifle, creativity. Allen muses on how, perhaps, the skill of the next generation might lie on mastering how to extract meaning from this cacophony. He cites the example of Evan Taubenfeld, a guitarist and producer in a rock band.

  He was telling me how he’s learned to produce an album most effectively. Some of the best ideas for his songs happen while he and his band are working on another one. Now he has a whiteboard in the studio. They’ll be in the middle of one thing, suddenly get inspired about something else, and stop to capture it. Evan said it’s chaotic, but once the band got used to it and trusted the process, they were way more productive and more creative than ever. Before he realised the power of capturing thoughts as they occur, and building in just the kind of structures that he needed to foster and support the process, he experienced lots of wasted and frustrated energy, with much less output. Trying to exert the “discipline” of staying focused on one song at a time stifled his creativity. The coolest thing about the new process, he said, was that making music was fun again.

  We thought this was cool, and inspiring. And we’re now less worried about not finishing pieces we start. Far from trying to install some form of order around the cacophony, maybe we should jump into it? Maybe we resist order and accept that it’s from within that craziness that we might craft and find creativity?

  You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star. (Nietzsche)

  

  19 Comments

  Tags:

  ADD, attention crash, CPA, errrrrrr, OCD
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