R.E.M. "Man-Sized Wreath">
Studio: Crush Inc., Toronto
Directors will often refer to the ad and music industries as "separate beasts", but lately both are pawing at the world of digital media. In an interview with the Associated Press a few months ago, R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe pronounced the music video "dead", murdered by the Internet. He then unveiled a series of interactive websites designed to engage the band's long-time fans more deeply in the recording of and touring for their 14th studio album, Accelerate.

Fittingly, Stipe turned to an ad production company, Toronto-based creative boutique Crush, to create two web promos, "Hollow Man" and "Man-Sized Wreath", graphical elements of which the band has repackaged as downloadable remix-and-mash-up content and concert visuals. Inspired by Accelerate's fast, aggressive recording process and punkish aesthetic, as well as retro pixel and text-based web art that the album's producer, Jacknife Lee, brought into the studio, the Crush team sought to capture a crude, guerilla look with a mix of live action, Flame, After Effects design and animation, 3D tracking and Maya CG.

"Even though it comes across as being pretty lo-fi, we used pretty much every piece of gear we've got," says Crush CD Gary Thomas. "Something that was this dense with little meanings and subtexts throughout isn't easy to put across in a straight, live-action delivery."

The pointed lyrics of "Man-Sized Wreath" were inspired by President George W. Bush's visit to a Martin Luther King Jr. memorial, the basis for the video's "disconnected power" theme, represented by a boxy, Atari-style motorcade. Another visual thread is distracting media (i.e. advertising): billboards in a Times Square-style streetscape spew colored boxes, which chase apathetic pedestrians. As the motorcade passes by, it creates more boxes, representing mindless media consumption.

"The overall tone is this unfeeling, almost cold violence," says Thomas. "[R.E.M.] has been smart about getting their message out to people more directly - they've made use of their website and MySpace. I think Michael wanted this video to be something that finds its own way out into the world." KR

Crush http://www.crushinc.com
R.E.M. http://www.remhq.com

Sony "HDNA">
Studio: Tronic, New York City
Acronyms might seem like the driest of ground for mining creative ideas. But for New York-based Tronic a literal approach worked best in creating a narrative-driven :90 in-store spot for Sony's HDNA technology.

The spot, featuring the journey of a plucky molecule, sees our miniature hero diving into a prism that bursts into color and builds into flowers, balls and ultimately a woman dancing. "It was a completely open brief; the only thing they had was a little 2D symbol [from the campaign's print iterations]," explains Tronic co-founder Vivian Rosenthal. "We liked their play on words with the HDNA, and DNA as it relates to people, so we wanted to play on that and the idea of scale. We wanted to make the link between [how using] Sony's HDNA technology makes up who we are in our daily lives - when we use their MP3 player or watch their TVs - and also wanted to keep it playful."

The thin space that the HD film was played across in stores, three 52-inch plasma monitors side by side, proved problematic, as did the large number of particles required. Luckily the studio had previous experience with odd-shaped media spaces (including massive, moving outdoor screens for Target), and using the Particle Flow tool in Autodesk's 3ds Max helped with the large workflow. Careful planning was needed to factor in render times within the production schedule for the project, which took a team of five a month to complete.

"You really have to have confidence in the end result because you don't have time to render twice," says co-founder Jesse Seppi. "You can't be ambivalent, and you can't over-think because sometimes you do and get paralyzed creatively." EW

Tronic Studio http://www.tronicstudio.com

Dortmund Concert Hall "Black Poem">
Studio: Sehsucht, Hamburg
For decades, designers have railed against the clean complacency of Helvetica and its related fonts. So when it came time for Hamburg agency Jung von Matt/Elbe to create the third in a series of text-based campaigns for the Dortmund Concert Hall, the solution wasn't so much a backlash as a typological backdraft.

"When we need text in a commercial, I'm always concerned it will feel too cold, too digital," says JVM CD Sascha Hanke. "We'll try to make text feel as human and warm as possible - or in this case, set it on fire."

To launch the concert hall's 2008/2009 season, the agency created "Black Poem", melding in-camera pyrotechnics, stock footage and CGI with an abstract narrative and music by Ankara-based composer Fazil Say. As a metaphor for burning musical passion, the artists' names appear as smoldering embers, flickering in and out before igniting in tandem with Say's dark, hallucinatory composition.

The flaming fonts were 10cm to 20cm tall, carved out of wood, metal and plastic, and set alight in mograph firm Sehsucht's Hamburg studio.

Director Niko Tziopanos decided straight 3D animation would be too time-consuming and opted to use modified stock footage for the fire. The team broke the spot into five segments, crafting a narrative about a little girl in a forest fleeing a pack of hungry wolves within the fiery imagery swirling around the letters.

"We could make the same film with cake pieces if we had to," says Tziopanos. "The visual impact of a flame has an intense effect on the audience, but we never really philosophize during the project." KR