In the canon of classic rock songs, Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze" stands out as an aural icon of the 1960s and, thanks to a medieval re-working of the track for BBC Four promo "Medieval Mind Trip" from RKCR/Y&R London, it's now an icon of the 5th to 16th centuries too.

In the promo, the psychedelic track accompanies an equally trippy, kaleidoscopic animated ride through the mind of an average citizen of the Middle Ages. Helmed by James Price through new multi-media prodco Strange Beast, London with animation facilitated by Transistor Studios, the spot promotes BBC Four's Medieval Season, which features programming investigating the intellectual landscape of that era.

And, by all accounts, it was an interesting landscape. Sure, people believed the world was round, and the printing press was invented during this period. But it was also believed that the rest of the world was populated with unicorns and dog-headed men.

"On one hand the medieval people could build incredible pieces of architecture like the cathedrals," says RKCR/Y&R, London creative Jules Chalkley. "Yet somehow [they could also] believe that goblins were running around in the basement. It felt to us like quite a trippy time and we started to think of what would be a seminal piece of music to bring that to life."

Cue "Purple Haze" and composer Tam Nightingale of Nightingale Music, who assembled an orchestra of musicians that re-recorded the track using authentic medieval instruments.

"What got me really excited about the project was when Jules and Nick [Simons] presented the idea, 'Purple Haze' re-recorded by medieval instruments, in a kind of off-the-cuff way," says Price, who spent five non-stop days designing the piece and another five weeks in production.

He and his team scoured reference books for medieval imagery. "The beauty of the period is it falls outside of copyright restrictions," he laughs. "We went back and forth and found a bunch of royalty-free imagery."

The spot, completed in After Effects, Maya and Cinema 4D, is the perfect marriage of sound and visuals, the result of the music being on board from conception to completion.

"We animated to Jimi Hendrix's recording, then we changed the track out and did minor tweaking," explains Price. "It was good for us to animate to a music track because it really helps with timing. When you can marry two things together like sound and vision, it's a much stronger project. So it was really great to have the opportunity to actually do that and then point to people and say, 'This is why we should have the music at the start.'"

RKCR/Y&R http://www.rkcryr.com
Strange Beast http://www.strangebeast.tv
Transistor Studios http://www.transistorstudios.com
Passion Pictures http://www.passion-pictures.com