Dead Air:
Thom Cards:
Lest we forget, from the mid-Nineties Radiohead’s enthusiasm for music video did a great deal to revive the reputation of the medium as an artform. From Street Spirit and Just (both 1995) to Karma Police and No Surprises, their collaborations with directors like Jonathan Glazer and Jamie Thraves have helped set the standards.
But now, with the imminent release of their fourth album - and when the music landscape (and its TV presentation) has apparently changed so much even since their last one - the “pop promo” in its recognised form is considered, for them, surplus to requirements. Are we witnessing the end of an era?
When the world’s most popular pop music can be broadly divided into categories like rap, teen pop, nu metal, R&B and dance, Radiohead are still, according to one recent poll, the most important band since The Beatles. So this is not an insignificant decision. As has been reported, the band has declared there will be no singles from the forthcoming album Kid A. However, according to Dilly Gent, supervisor of Radiohead’s filmed output, the decision to take an alternative approach was creatively driven. “At the time I didn’t know they weren’t planning to release singles,” she says, “But we've been there and done it with the three-minute formula. It didn’t excite us any more.”
This was made easier by surveying the current environment for music on TV. Where would the kind of serious, potentially controversial videos likely to be made for Radiohead going to fit in? “We didn’t want a video that could only go out late at night, or would probably scare or depress the children. So we decided not to bother,” says Gent. Instead they have arrived upon an alternative experience - the “blipvert”. Or, in effect, advertising-length films that run between 10 and 40 seconds, which feature random cuts of music from Kid A. The films are the work of Shynola and Chris Bran, and they have created up to 80 of them, which will function either as paid advertising for the album, programming on TV or will pop up on the internet. There will even be blips for outdoor screens like at Piccadilly Circus.
Some of Bran’s internet blips are already running, other blips primed to swamp the screens on September 30, and others will continue to break during the course of the marketing campaign for the album. Hence the fact their content is a closely-guarded secret until then, but PROMO has had a sneak preview of a couple, and spoken to some of those involved in the project. It is clear they have revelled in a relatively open brief and almost complete creative freedom.
Jason Groves of the animation team Shynola says they were planning to take a break from the increasing demand of commercial and video work to work on more experimental ideas when the project came along which basically offered them exactly that. “Total creative freedom, a chance to be adventurous and it’s Radiohead, who we all love,” he summarises.
Shynola has quickly built a small but highly regarded body of work in 3D animation - even if some of their earlier stuff has been credited singly to member Richard ‘Kenny’ Kenworthy - which obviously appealed to Radiohead, particularly as they inclined towards anonymity and animation this time round.
What was required was something that was inspired by paintings made by Stanley Dunwood (who created the artwork for OK Computer) and Thom Yorke. “They brought around photographs of the paintings and told us what they were thinking about at the time when they made them,” says Groves. As the cover of the album (as seen on the official band website) shows, the paintings featured bleak, arctic scenes. But they and Bran also had access to Dunwood’s sketchbooks, which featured the loosely-drawn, rather malevolently fanged bear character which appears in many manifestations in many of the blips.
“It was a very loose brief,” says Jason. “Dilly said ‘Make as many as you can, between 10 and 40 seconds. We could cut and paste any music from the album we liked. We've done mostly 10s and 20s.” As Chris Bran, the other filmmaker and animator who, if anything, worked even closer with the band and Dunwood says, “In several cases there are different visuals to the same piece of music, and the inspiration came as much from the music as the artwork.”
Certainly the blips provide intriguing glimpses of music which suggests as much experimentation as the visuals. The two blips released to PROMO feature cuts from the track Kid A which are basically a ferocious jazz jam. Both feature the iconic bear in different forms - as a scribbled line drawing in Screaming aka Jerk, and a physical version in the live action, DV-shot Geese (actually made from bread and lard). In both the bear is engulfed by even more ferocious creatures, but apparently that’s only part of the story.
“There are all sorts of different bears, and according to Stanley they’re suposed to be all the bears that you left behind from childhood and are coming back to get you,” says Bran. Groves adds, “In some the bear is the victim, in some the bear is the aggressor, and in some there’s no bear at all. It’s not obvious in Stanley’s drawings what position the bear takes. It’s not about good guys and bad guys.”
Despite their live action debut with Geese, most of the Shynola material - about 40 pieces in all - are in 3D. The team members - Groves, Kenworthy, Gideon Baws and Chris Harding - worked on blips both independently and as ad hoc groups for about four months. “For instance Kenny might come up with an idea and Chris may model it,” says Groves. “We all do everything but we all have different strengths: Gideon’s is in storytelling; Kenny’s is editing and comping; Chris is the most adept and quickest animator; and I was trained as an illustrator.”
The basic objective was to match the tone and feeling behind the paintings, which Groves confesses to being, for the most part, “spooky”. From his descriptions of stick men fights to the death in the snow and slimy basement bears it is evident from Kid A’s visuals will be often disquieting, warped versions of kids’ stuff.
Bran describes the process of building and refining the work over several months as itself like recording an album. In fact, he developed his close ties with the band and Dunwood by filming webcasts of the Radiohead recording sessions at certain points during the album’s gestation, and a few animations like the net braodcast Tadpole Monster derive from that period.
“I had no consultations with Shynola so they’ve sometimes used the same paintings as me as the basis of the piece and come up with someting totally different,” says Bran. From the limited evidence, we can expect more high end material from Shynola (who have Silicon graphics technology which they won at a film festival) compared to the more lo-fi pieces by Bran (who favours After Effects). Certainly Bran’s highly graphic short animations are more suited to the internet. “The idea of the blips is so good on the net as they are then become collectable, like Pokemon,” he says.
By their nature the short blips work best for streaming and downloading, and both “teams” favoured making shorter length pieces until Gent encourage them to extend some, often by cutting together different ideas — Radiohead did not even stipulate that the music was sacrosanct and has been looped in some of Bran’s longer blips.
What is certain is that we can only guess at the contnet of the huge majority of the blipvert but the forthcoing campaign could be an interesting few months in which some of the basic tenets of visual promotion of music are fundamentally challenged. Things may never be the same again.
But now, with the imminent release of their fourth album - and when the music landscape (and its TV presentation) has apparently changed so much even since their last one - the “pop promo” in its recognised form is considered, for them, surplus to requirements. Are we witnessing the end of an era?
When the world’s most popular pop music can be broadly divided into categories like rap, teen pop, nu metal, R&B and dance, Radiohead are still, according to one recent poll, the most important band since The Beatles. So this is not an insignificant decision. As has been reported, the band has declared there will be no singles from the forthcoming album Kid A. However, according to Dilly Gent, supervisor of Radiohead’s filmed output, the decision to take an alternative approach was creatively driven. “At the time I didn’t know they weren’t planning to release singles,” she says, “But we've been there and done it with the three-minute formula. It didn’t excite us any more.”
This was made easier by surveying the current environment for music on TV. Where would the kind of serious, potentially controversial videos likely to be made for Radiohead going to fit in? “We didn’t want a video that could only go out late at night, or would probably scare or depress the children. So we decided not to bother,” says Gent. Instead they have arrived upon an alternative experience - the “blipvert”. Or, in effect, advertising-length films that run between 10 and 40 seconds, which feature random cuts of music from Kid A. The films are the work of Shynola and Chris Bran, and they have created up to 80 of them, which will function either as paid advertising for the album, programming on TV or will pop up on the internet. There will even be blips for outdoor screens like at Piccadilly Circus.
Some of Bran’s internet blips are already running, other blips primed to swamp the screens on September 30, and others will continue to break during the course of the marketing campaign for the album. Hence the fact their content is a closely-guarded secret until then, but PROMO has had a sneak preview of a couple, and spoken to some of those involved in the project. It is clear they have revelled in a relatively open brief and almost complete creative freedom.
Jason Groves of the animation team Shynola says they were planning to take a break from the increasing demand of commercial and video work to work on more experimental ideas when the project came along which basically offered them exactly that. “Total creative freedom, a chance to be adventurous and it’s Radiohead, who we all love,” he summarises.
Shynola has quickly built a small but highly regarded body of work in 3D animation - even if some of their earlier stuff has been credited singly to member Richard ‘Kenny’ Kenworthy - which obviously appealed to Radiohead, particularly as they inclined towards anonymity and animation this time round.
What was required was something that was inspired by paintings made by Stanley Dunwood (who created the artwork for OK Computer) and Thom Yorke. “They brought around photographs of the paintings and told us what they were thinking about at the time when they made them,” says Groves. As the cover of the album (as seen on the official band website) shows, the paintings featured bleak, arctic scenes. But they and Bran also had access to Dunwood’s sketchbooks, which featured the loosely-drawn, rather malevolently fanged bear character which appears in many manifestations in many of the blips.
“It was a very loose brief,” says Jason. “Dilly said ‘Make as many as you can, between 10 and 40 seconds. We could cut and paste any music from the album we liked. We've done mostly 10s and 20s.” As Chris Bran, the other filmmaker and animator who, if anything, worked even closer with the band and Dunwood says, “In several cases there are different visuals to the same piece of music, and the inspiration came as much from the music as the artwork.”
Certainly the blips provide intriguing glimpses of music which suggests as much experimentation as the visuals. The two blips released to PROMO feature cuts from the track Kid A which are basically a ferocious jazz jam. Both feature the iconic bear in different forms - as a scribbled line drawing in Screaming aka Jerk, and a physical version in the live action, DV-shot Geese (actually made from bread and lard). In both the bear is engulfed by even more ferocious creatures, but apparently that’s only part of the story.
“There are all sorts of different bears, and according to Stanley they’re suposed to be all the bears that you left behind from childhood and are coming back to get you,” says Bran. Groves adds, “In some the bear is the victim, in some the bear is the aggressor, and in some there’s no bear at all. It’s not obvious in Stanley’s drawings what position the bear takes. It’s not about good guys and bad guys.”
Despite their live action debut with Geese, most of the Shynola material - about 40 pieces in all - are in 3D. The team members - Groves, Kenworthy, Gideon Baws and Chris Harding - worked on blips both independently and as ad hoc groups for about four months. “For instance Kenny might come up with an idea and Chris may model it,” says Groves. “We all do everything but we all have different strengths: Gideon’s is in storytelling; Kenny’s is editing and comping; Chris is the most adept and quickest animator; and I was trained as an illustrator.”
The basic objective was to match the tone and feeling behind the paintings, which Groves confesses to being, for the most part, “spooky”. From his descriptions of stick men fights to the death in the snow and slimy basement bears it is evident from Kid A’s visuals will be often disquieting, warped versions of kids’ stuff.
Bran describes the process of building and refining the work over several months as itself like recording an album. In fact, he developed his close ties with the band and Dunwood by filming webcasts of the Radiohead recording sessions at certain points during the album’s gestation, and a few animations like the net braodcast Tadpole Monster derive from that period.
“I had no consultations with Shynola so they’ve sometimes used the same paintings as me as the basis of the piece and come up with someting totally different,” says Bran. From the limited evidence, we can expect more high end material from Shynola (who have Silicon graphics technology which they won at a film festival) compared to the more lo-fi pieces by Bran (who favours After Effects). Certainly Bran’s highly graphic short animations are more suited to the internet. “The idea of the blips is so good on the net as they are then become collectable, like Pokemon,” he says.
By their nature the short blips work best for streaming and downloading, and both “teams” favoured making shorter length pieces until Gent encourage them to extend some, often by cutting together different ideas — Radiohead did not even stipulate that the music was sacrosanct and has been looped in some of Bran’s longer blips.
What is certain is that we can only guess at the contnet of the huge majority of the blipvert but the forthcoing campaign could be an interesting few months in which some of the basic tenets of visual promotion of music are fundamentally challenged. Things may never be the same again.