Sunday 23 March 2014

Remixability in Action

On the 12th of January 2014 I had the pleasure of attending a concert at Leigh Sawmill Cafe featuring Julia Deans, Annie Crummer and my brother Tama Waipara. It was my second visit to the venue as I also was there on Oct 6 2013, to hear my brother perform songs off his new album ‘Fill Up The Silence’, for which I designed the artwork.

On his previous ‘Sir Plus’ album cover I used a more traditional approach, such as photo referencing for pencil sketches, then traced in Adobe Illustrator, and since the brief dealt with a fictitous/secondary/alternate persona, rendering it in a comic-book style seemed highly appropriate. The theme also had elements of the theatrical about it, and this influenced the layout and typography design choices.


Album Artwork © copyright Tama Waipara


By contrast, on the new album I used a motion graphics program (normally associated with animation) to build a 2D design solution. The name of the album, ‘Fill Up the Silence’ suggested a void, but rather than being empty I imagined a background with some sort of noise radiation that would exist in the universe since creation. The workflow started off in Adobe Illustrator where graphic and typographic elements were assembled and imported into Adobe After Effects, where the use of 3D space, virtual camera, lights and special effects could be employed. This assemblage was then exported as .psd files into Adobe Photoshop, before finally being added to layout pages back in Adobe Illustrator.


Album Artwork © copyright Tama Waipara

This approach was inspired by Lev Manovich’s theory of remixability, which I first encountered in the seminal article After Effects and the Velvet Revolution. And so this album cover was an experiment on my part to see if something like cross-platform/cross-program creativity would be possible, working from the impetus of my past and ongoing research.