Hasta La Ideas

Basement Jaxx asked media artist Max Hattler to create stage visuals for their current tour: “There was no brief, no pitch, they just wanted me to do whatever I want – as long as it didn’t involve monkeys!”

Hattler was asked to create visuals for the track Where’s Your Head At on the band’s current tour. “One day last autumn I got a call from Basement Jaxx’s management. Simon and Felix had seen my film Drift winning the award for best digital film at the London International Animation Festival. They liked Drift enough to trawl through my website and get their manager to call me,” Hattler says. “I decided to base the concept on the grid structure of the LED display on which the visuals are shown. The 7 by 2 meter screen is made up of 60 square LED elements, four rows of 15 elements. I decided to go for a very flat aesthetic, in which the screen acts as a wall, rather than a window to a three-dimensional space. Each of the blocks that make up the screen becomes a tile in the makeup of the overall picture, a pixel in the construction of the visual narrative.”

Here’s the piece in action:

Directed and produced by Max Hattler
Animation by Max Hattler, Milad Firoozian (3D), Noriko Okaku, Rodrigo Vives, Papaya Gonzales.

And here’s Hattler’s Drift film