Link to: FX CAKE – Season 5 Main Titles, Bumps & Music
Link to Process & Gifs: All Things CAKE
Tag: live action
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.
Impactist – HEY PIG
We rubbed the fun prism four times just like grandma had instructed us to upon her return home after helping in the Void Wars. What materialized two days later via express shipping was a Proper Information Getter, and what that PIG had to say resides in these tracks.
Sweep yourself back through an open time-rift, back to the moment the sample “Dude, this party is SO rad, but oh my God, if my parents find out I’m here” was recorded to cassette. Three dollars at the door was all it took to get inside, and behind the dj something not dissimilar to this promo is projected and injected straight into your gaze holes.
Hungry from the journey, you ask: Hey PIG? Where can I get a Two For One Burger Bun?
Links to stream or download: HEY PIG – EP (2020)
Links to stills: HEY PIG PROMO + “DUDE THIS PARTY IS SO RAD”
Time to tell the boys.
You’re the Worst – Season 5
The fifth and final season of You’re the Worst on FXX follows the two narcissistic self-destructive leads, Jimmy and Gretchen, approach towards their impending marriage.
For the episodic package and promos, we spent a couple days shooting thousands of sequential stills on location in Los Angeles throughout the YTW universe. In a broken editorial style we combined the loose photographic compositions of Silver Lake, cast imagery, anonymous wedding moments and letter boards common to the entrance of countless conference rooms, banquet halls, and other rental spaces when converted to wedding reception locations. Additionally, an original typeface was created to match the photographed letter boards and included in the final client toolkit deliverables for later updating of program details.
The reliably blue skied and sun-kissed LA weather let us make time efficient use of our glimmer-glassed, pro-misted, vintage lensed, and color balanced Canon bodies paired with a custom LUT created pre-shoot to unify the color of the final package. We even found ourselves briefly camping inside Ye Rustic Inn to backup flash cards to the cloud, but without getting blacklisted like Gretchen.
Beyond neighborhood specific street photography, further photographic elements like pattern details and obvious, high concept LA scenes of highway traffic, towering palms, distant skylines, etc. were captured and intercut for context.
Knockin’ Boots
The first time you lay your eyes on them, you’re entranced. You’re hypnotized by those delicate calves flexing your direction, but you’re smart and remember there aren’t any muscles in fingers so it’s nothing but all-natural tendons and those hot, hot finger-boots that have you suddenly considering a new future for yourself and this vision of beauty strutting before you.
With moves like The Shy Leg, The Basic Instinct, and The Playful Kitten to name a few, we were happy to get the go-ahead from FX to craft a few temperature raising IDs with all focus on these unexpected steamy getaway sticks. Matched with a laid back R&B track like H-Town’s “Knockin’ Da Boots”, Ginuwine’s “Pony”, Whapp’s “Put It In”, G Gerlz “Ride It and Hide It”, or any number of classic hits, these moves will move.
Get ready to see all the bridesmaids doing The Playful Kitten at the next wedding reception you’re at. Sorry, not sorry.
Sofa King Sexy Pet Sounds for TBS
Welcome to the Thunderfoam? Tee Bee Oh Yes? TB Foam Home? Right to Bare Arms? All potential contenders for titles, but you know Sofa King Sexy is going to win out. We were presented the awesome opportunity to make a handful of short network IDs for the cool crew at TBS earlier in 2018. So, you know we had to move into the wood clad and foam occupied love den for a while and wait for the mood to strike. Everything comes together and makes perfect sense. We said, it makes perfect sense, got it?
In addition to the foam party, we focused some small sensors on some miniscule and micro fauna to pair with audio from TBS series. Unexpected combinations of picture and sound, vivid color, and loose action make for several IDs to stimulate viewers during commercial breaks without explanation.
