Hasta La Ideas

Inspired by toys and board games from their childhood, directing duo Dent De Cuir have produced a musical Gif site playing animations timed to a custom track by French DJ SebastiAn.

An odd but highly entertaining site, PLAY displays a sequence of 17 Gifs designed to match SebastiAn’s 48-second composition.

Each features a cover image or advert for a classic game or toy brought to life with hand drawn animations: Hungry Hippos become man-eating Angry Hippos and GI Joe, a soldier blasting hearts and rainbows. Guessing game Guess Who has also been given a sinister makeover, and Battleships is now a picture of friendship.

Dent de Cuir – Jean-Philippe Chartrand and Benjamin Mege – came up with the idea after being commissioned by fashion trade show Who’s Next to create a video about the theme of this year’s show, toys.

“We decided to approach it as a mini music video. We collaborated with SebastiAn and asked him to create a custom track based on sound samples from toys. On completion, however, we felt like [it] wasn’t properly suited to that media, and came up with the idea of an interactive web platform with musical Gif sequences,” they say.

SebastiAn was given “full creative freedom” to produce the track and after receiving the final edit, Chartrand and Mege selected visuals and created animations based on the sounds and toys sampled.

The pair have directed several music videos for electronic acts, including Evil Twin for Modeselektor which made the official selection at last year’s SXSW festival and one for electronic duo Neosignal featuring Barbie dolls and Star Wars figurines.

They met while working as graphic designers and describe their process as a mix of “hands-on creativity and experimentation.”

“We are very inspired by popular culture…being both kids from the eighties, it was a treat for us to go back to our childhood toys chests and have a second thought about these objects we were raised with,” they add.