Todd Mueller, Eben Mears, Marie Hyon, Marco Spier and Kylie Matulick have created amorphous and fluid thought bubbles for Starburst, a photo-realistic orbital view of a wired world for Globalstar and organic pop-art meets gene mapped fractals for AT&T. Pre-Psyop, Mueller created MTV's Amp program while he and Mears, Hyon and Spier worked at MTV Networks. Next, Mears and Mueller created the Sci-Fi Network's on-air identity before the entire group founded Psyop, military jargon for the brand of counterintelligence known as Psychological Operations.

"We like to spend a lot of time in the conceptual phase, developing a visual language and metaphors," says Mueller.

Using the house palette of Softimage|XSI and flame*, the team rendered a photo-realistic Earth, complete with geometrically precise terrain, realistic touches like reflection passes for clouds and font-forward type.

"For the Globalstar campaign, the product was a satellite phone, so a language of compass headings and navigation graphics worked," says Mueller. "For Starburst, rather than creating realistic visualization we wanted a hyper-real taste chamber, and to explore the flow and dance of semi-viscous liquid. We tried to create an appetizing, hallucinatory quality with transparency and liquid animation."

Ensuring seamless transitions between scenes seems one of the few design "rules" applied to each project. According to Mueller, working with Grey Advertising, NY creatives Brian Lefkowitz and Sean Burns [who worked on both Globalstar and Starburst] from the conceptual stage made it possible to develop unique identities for each spot.

"We like to work together with the agency as much as possible as they have a lot of information about the products. Good ideas come from having the most information possible rather than having the most design books in the studio," says Mueller. Psyop's visual output owes more to cohesive concepting than to stolid devotion to dimensional quality or line weights. Mueller describes the packaging for an upcoming VH1 award program being directed by Hyon.

"Because the idea is viewer response, we are using census people icons, creating a visual identity based around the idea of a living statistic," says Mueller. Part of this project includes online content and Psyop is gearing up to generate broadband visuals. However, current broadcast TV resolution still provides a better showcase for artful motion graphics and design.

"The more resolution we can work with the more we can express and define the ideas," says Mueller. "However, if you have a T1 server pulling down T1 speeds you can get serious resolution. There is one beautiful compression algorithm from on2.com, that, at cable modem speeds, is only slightly smaller than TV resolution."

Web.files

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