Hasta La Ideas

Andre Anjos and Karl Kling are part of the Remix Artist Collective (RAC), which also includes Andrew Maury. Since 2007, RAC has produced remixes for bands such as Arcade Fire, Radiohead and Tokyo Police Club.

How did you get RAC started?
Andre: I had to choose between studying design and music – I chose music. I started out during sophomore year at Greenville College, where both Karl and I went. I studied music business but I wasn’t getting any internships, so I decided to make up my own job. I started doing remixes for fun, set up a website and started emailing people. After 6 months, still nothing was happening. But then I did my first remix, for the Shins. Remixes just seemed like a corner of the music industry that was untapped. Now I’m able to DJ full time, I don’t have a real job.The whole idea kind of RAC has changed, though. Originally I wanted everyone to do collaborations together, but it’s difficult to sustain and to do on a consistent basis. Now we’re a bunch of different people who do different things under one name. I think the name [Remix Artist Collective] still applies.

Do you have a remix philosophy?
Andre: We’re both definitely song writers and producers first. We approach our remixes from the song and studio perspective. We’re not thinking about the dance floor. We try to make the song better, to complement it. We try to use common sense.
Karl: And make good pop music.
Andre: We don’t think too much about it, it just kind of happens. With remixes there’s a deadline, no choice about getting it done. We just go do it and go with it.

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We finally moved all of our large furniture that had been in our our old home for staging into our new home. We reached the point where living out of boxes and feeling like temporary residents in our new home had become tiresome and frustrating, so we called in movers and got the job done.

Although the stuff came in on Saturday, we still aren’t finished unpacking all the boxes. In fact, our living room looks more cluttered now than it did last week when boxes lined the walls. As is often the case with projects like moving and uncluttering, things can be incredibly messy while doing the work.

We’re trying our hardest to keep our attention focused on how wonderful everything will look and feel when it’s put away in its proper storage space. But, I have to admit, our motivation has been waning. It feels like we need as much enthusiasm to tackle the last quarter of work as it did for the previous three-quarters.

To stay focused, we’ve become each other’s biggest cheerleaders. There have been a lot of “good jobs” and “great work” comments exchanged over the past couple days. But, we’ve acknowledged that the time might come when we need to use more rigorous techniques to keep us on task. These are the motivation strategies we may have to use as the week continues:

• Turn off the power. If checking email, watching television, playing a computer game, or talking on the phone can keep you from doing work, power down these devices before getting started uncluttering or organizing. Based on your level of temptation you may need to unplug the device from the wall, flip a switch on the circuit breaker, or simply hit the power button. You know yourself best, so do what you need to do.
• Hide temptations. In college, my friend Clark would appear at my door a week before finals were to begin with a box full of distractions. Inside the box would be video games, books he had been reading, his gym pass, and other items he could use to procrastinate. I’m pretty sure one year he also gave me his vacuum. You might not need to physically remove temptations from your home, but boxing them up and putting them in your basement, garage, or someplace out of the way might be a good idea for you.
• Have an accountability partner. Ask a friend to come over to help keep you on task. This friend doesn’t need to lift a finger, this friend only needs to sit and keep you company while you work. I don’t know how it helps, but it does. Return the favor when your friend needs an accountability partner to help stay on task.
• Invite guests over to your home. Scheduling a time when people will come into your home can be a strong motivator to get the work finished by a specific date and time.

There are hundreds of ways to stay motivated while you unclutter and organize. These are just the techniques we have on deck. What methods work for you? Share your strategies in the comments.

Like this site? Buy Erin Rooney Doland’s Unclutter Your Life in One Week from Amazon.com today.

Vincent Morisset’s studio AATOAA hope to re-imagine ‘once upon a time’ for the digital age. As part of their new adventures in storytelling they’ve released BLA BLA, a charming interactive film for the National Film Board of Canada…

Morisset’s Montréal outfit created the online animation piece for the legendary NFB which, since 1939, has sought to promote Canadian filmmaking. The NFB is particularly associated with experimental animation, a link that was started in 1941 when animator and director Norman McLaren joined the organisation. According to the board’s own charter, one of its ongoing concerns is to “support innovative and experimental projects in new and interactive media.”

BLA BLA, at blabla.nfb.ca, is one such venture. It is, its website explains, “an interactive tale that explores the fundamental principles of human communication. The viewer makes the story possible: without him or her, the characters remain inert, waiting for the next interaction. The spectator clicks, plays and searches through the simple, uncluttered scenes, truly driving the experience.”

Each of the website’s six chapters apparently reflect a different aspect of ‘communication’. The first section, Words, is an interactive musical number where users can play with tones by clicking on the various splodges. Sponge follows and introduces the charming large-headed character who will eat up all the coloured pills you feed him (it’s strangely addictive for both parties).

The remaining sections, Beginnings, Talk Talk, Together and Lights Out, see the character falling through the sky, and becoming part of a choreographed troupe. In each, users play an active role in deciding how the animation progresses.

The characters were designed by Caroline Robert (a CR One to Watch in our special issue from earlier this year) using traditional craft techniques such as stop-motion puppetry and drawings, as well as a range of high-tech trickery, from ActionScript animation to real-time 3D mapping.

For Morisset, however, these tools are the least important part of the work. “I wanted BLA BLA to feel hand-made, imperfect, fragile,” he writes on the website, “so we forget about the technology. I wanted to create moods and generate emotions through an interactive piece. It’s quite hard to do dramatic crescendos on a website. I thought it would be an interesting challenge.”

The characters’ speech, as well as all the music featured in the project, was fragmented into small clips and distributed throughout the programming. An approach of ‘controlled randomness’ was taken by composer Philippe Lambert, who worked with software developer Édouard Lanctôt-Benoit on the project.

Exploring the “grammar of a new medium” i.e. having the user as a participant in the storytelling, was one of Morisset’s concerns. “The relation between the user and the film is part of the message,” he says. “We wrote and created it based on universal stuff: the social nature of humans, our fear of the unknown, the desire for appropriation and freedom, and paradoxically the love of being taken by the hand.”

Once visitors have played with BLA BLA a further treat lies in store if they click Related Films at the bottom of the website. Here, AATOAA has uploaded six classic NFB animations by Ryan Larkin (1972), Jeu (2006), René Jodoin (1966), Michèle Cournoyer (1992), Brandon Blommaert (2009), and the aforementioned Norman McLaren (1941).

Morisset is perhaps best known for his work with the band Arcade Fire: namely the website/interactive music video for their song Neon Bible and the documentary, Miroir Noir. More recently, AATOAA’s Synchronised Artwork app for the band’s album, The Suburbs (available with the download version from arcadefire.com) was featured in this year’s CR Annual. You can view the project in the 2011 Annual, here, or read a more detailed report from when we blogged about it last year, here. Unfortunately, in our Annual, we spelled Morisset’s studio name incorrectly (apologies again to AATOAA), but in better news we were able to award Arcade Fire with our inaugural Client of the Year title.

CR subscribers can also read Eliza’s profile piece on Morisset, Web-Friendly, from our January 2010 issue, here.

BLA BLA is at blabla.nfb.ca.

Produced by NFB. Designed and developed by AATOAA. Direction, animation and compositing: Vincent Morisset. Production: Hugues Sweeney. Programming and technology: Édouard Lanctôt-Benoit. Visual design and animation: Caroline Robert. Sound, music and voice: Philippe Lambert. Puppet armature design:
Jean-François Lévesque. Rotoscopy:
Vincent Lambert. Photography:
Minelly Kamemura. Additional prototype programming: Mathieu Campagna. Prototype 3D modelling and animation: Joshua Sherrett
and Jonathan Fleming-Bock.

Thanks for reading the CR Blog but if you are not getting Creative Review in print too, we think you are missing out. Our current 196-page double May issue includes the Creative Review Annual, featuring the best work of the year in advertising and graphic design. We also have an interview with David Byrne, a fascinating story on the making of the Penguin Great Food series of book covers and much more.

If you would like to buy this issue and are based in the UK, you can search for your nearest stockist here. Based outside the UK? Simply call +44(0)207 292 3703 to find your nearest stockist. Better yet, subscribe to CR for a year here and save yourself almost 30% on the printed magazine.

When it comes to graphic design, all eyes are on GQ. At Friday’s Society of Publication Designers awards gala, the Conde Nast title won the gold medal for Magazine of the Year, besting a finalist field that included Wired, W, More, and Richard Turley‘s fresh feast for the eyes, Bloomberg Businessweek (which went on to a win a gold medal for best redesign). It was the second major triumph of the week for GQ design director Fred Woodward, who last Monday joined editor-in-chief Jim Nelson in picking up the National Magazine Award for design from the American Society of Magazine Editors—and breaking Wired‘s three-year winning streak. Among the other big winners at the ASME’s night of a thousand editors were W (which took home the Alexander Calder-designed statuette in the photography category), The New York Times Magazine (news and documentary photography), and ESPN The Magazine (feature photography). Meanwhile, the SPD presented its inaugural Tablet App of the Year award to Gael Towey for Martha Stewart Living‘s “Boundless Beauty.” Click here to download and peruse a list of all the SPD medal winners.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Sports marketer Stefanie Gordon was lucky enough to score a row of three empty seats on a flight from NYC to Palm Beach, and even luckier to look out of the window at the captain’s prompting and capture the above photo. It’s the Space Shuttle Endeavor making its final launch.

The times being what they are, Gordon Tweeted the photo from the ground and is now getting her fifteen minutes. NASA and every news organization you can think of re-tweeted the photo and news show appearance requests have been pouring in. Gordon’s Twitter followers shot from roughly 1,800 to the 4,000 range, and she’s been quick to capitalize on the boost: “Anyone want to hire me???” Gordon tweeted, with the hashtag “#worldfamousiphonephotographer.” Jeez Louise.

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