Category: Videos

CAKE

Kindly asked by FX to package season 5 of their anthology series Cake, we thought of all the ways you get CAKE in your body. You don’t just watch it with your cry-balls, but you absorb it through your sound lobes, your feets, your dainty digits, your beaks, and your teefies. Like a forced feeding of unique content you innocently pretend not to want, this CAKE is getting in.

Building out these ideas into physical realities resulted in a series of automated constructions we termed ‘Mechanicakes’. We built numerous body parts to interact with novel CAKE shapes in distinct fashion. Lifecasts were duplicated from silicon molds, hand sculpted appendages made from foam, and two part epoxy wonders were chemically brought into existence and combined with simple mechanized workings to loop actions over and over. Just FYI, we left out the automated butt cheeks to keep everything safe for work and safe for client, but know we were thinking of you.

Ten episodes, a Mechanicake for each episode. A metric cake-ton of deliverables.

The Mechanicakes are real mechanical constructions built, automated and photographed in the meat-space. Further post manipulations drive the resulting devices into the Venn diagram overlap of motion design.

Hey, we made the music, too.  Built from field recorded percussion, we took domestic items like silverware shakes, table top thumps, dough punches, güiro styled knife serrations, mixer motor noises, and other CAKE making related sources for programming.  Additionally, these sources were used within granular synthesizers to create melodic tones and lush pads.

But Kaniel, Delly… Why is the song called Waterlanding? What’s that got to do with CAKE?  Well, when we are invited to pitch creative ideas on a project, many concepts are left behind. One idea was a sentient bundt cake that soared above the clouds. With deadpan expression, it interacted with sweeping vistas and airline ephemera. With CAKE air travel on the brain, and needing a file name, Waterlanding was one of many proposed music directions. Filenames are weird.

Link to: Individual Episode Main Titles + Bumps Videos & Stills
Link to Process & Gifs: All Things CAKE

The Choe Show

In the FX series The Choe Show, artist David Choe interviews and explores relationships via paint and patter, finishing with portraits of guests rendered at the end of each exchange. Last Spring, tasked with reflecting the feel of the FX series, we put together a few different concepts for effective episodic packages that touched directly on details that we found significant after an early preview of the episodes.

Combining live-action angles of thick, heavy body paints with multi-plane arrayed flower and live-action plant details, we crafted an ever changing, ever shifting reflection of the series’ tone. Thick peaks of saturated paint meld with flower accents. Two-dimensional surfaces transition to three-dimensions while petals, pistils, and stamens erupt from rippling colors. In addition, we handcrafted analog type elements and alphabets to complete the package.

As a new and novel type of series, our intent, like all our projects, was to deliver unique visuals to communicate the program’s singular tone. We were happy to work together with the talented team at FX to follow through successfully on that intention.

Link to Stills and Credits

A Wilderness of Error

The five-part FX documentary series A Wilderness of Error plays like a meta retelling of multiple accounts of the same story through multiple lenses. The initial account of a gruesome crime is questioned. That questioning is questioned. And, yes, that questioning is itself questioned. Phew.

Tasked with developing a creative take for an episodic package, we focused on this repeated digestion of the story and errors entailed within. We took a literal approach and exploited actual ‘errors’ in a technique wherein each frame is informed by the preceding image. Visual errors get amplified, much like the investigators, writers, and filmmakers have amplified over the years.

Link to Stills and Credits

The Most Dangerous Animal of All

Beneath the outward facade of some families lay dark secrets. Gary Stewart’s family may have one of the darkest. Earlier this year we were kindly asked and tasked by folks at FX with reinterpreting the trope filled landscape of true crime series graphics for The Most Dangerous Animal of All. This four-part documentary based on Stewart’s best selling book of the same name focuses on the story of a man discovering the potential reality his own father was the notorious Zodiac killer.

We produced an episodic package composed of original photography and hand drawn ciphers, further manipulated with rips, tears, and abrasions to reinforce the menacing tone of the series.

Fortunately, for this project, the Impactist image archive was available to supply the needed textures and analog photography we would use to complete the package. Opportunities like this also reinforce what we feel is a good habit: to be continually making images and cataloging them for future needs.

Links to Stills and Credits.