Reykjavík Grapevine - 12.09.2014, Blaðsíða 23

About halfway through the project, I
sat down with Hjalti Karlsson at an un-
named Manhattan tavern to discuss the
process so far. Sipping on a Corona, he
excitedly browsed through his iPhone,
looking for visuals to show me. “Wait,
you have to hear this!” he exclaims and
offers a pair of headphones. “I shouldn’t
be sharing the music like this, but, you
know, you can’t take it with you. And I’m
really obsessed with this tune right now.”
Hjalti, it turns out, has been a fan of
Gusgus for a long time. And he is stoked
to be working with the band. “I remem-
ber buying [international début] ‘Polydis-
tortion’ in 1997, and absolutely loving
it. And I’ve followed them closely ever
since. They are definitely one of my fa-
vourite bands.”
The plan, he says, is for karlsson-
wilker to design vinyl and CD versions
of ‘Mexico,’ along covers for the album’s
singles, a new logo and accompanying
visuals for the album’s entire campaign.
“Then, the idea surfaced that we’d also
create a few videos for the album, which
really titillated me. We’ve made all kinds
of animation and stop motion work for
clients like Nintendo and MTV, but never
a bona fide music video. It’s an exciting
project, and we delved right in.”
CREATIVE TIME
A few months later, ‘Mexico’ has been
released with great fanfare, along with
their video for the album’s title track.
Over the phone, Hjalti discusses the cre-
ative process, how they went about it all.
“We were initially presented with
three or four songs, and the working title
“Mexico,” he says. “After immersing our-
selves in the music a bit, we sat down and
discussed how we should move forward
like we usually do, me, Jan [Wilker] and
Sandra [Shizuka]. We would just talk and
try out different things on our respective
computers. It was a very organic pro-
cess.”
As a veteran in the field, Hjalti has
seen some changes in the ways the cre-
ative work gets done.
“Back when I started
in the business, you
would always sketch
things out with a
pencil and pad. We
don’t really do that
anymore—the pro-
cess now mostly en-
tails discussing the
different projects at
length before sitting
at the computer to
draft out the ideas.”
I ask him if the
cactus man on the
album cover is meant
to respond to the title.
The question sur-
prises him. “That’s
an interesting idea.
We honestly never
thought of it that way.
The form was just
something we were
experimenting with
and wound up being
an appealing image. I believe this is ac-
tually the first time this connection is
pointed out to me, Mexico and cacti and
all that.”
He laughs, and continues: “Now that
you say it, it seems so obvious. But it re-
ally wasn’t planned like that. We never
meant the artwork to reference Mexico
the country; in fact we decided that us-
ing colours and imagery associated with
it would be kind of clichéd and lazy. Our
main point of departure for the whole
project was that it should consist of a
bunch of random shapes and colours that
would clash with one another. The figure
that wound up on the cover, I think we
sent like four proposals to the band, and
in the end that one came out on top. The
cactus man.”
“NEW YORK HOT”
Hjalti pauses and tells me to hold. “You
should talk to Sandra,” he says. “She was
very involved in the whole process and
might have some interesting things to say
about it all.”
Sandra picks up
the receiver and in-
troduces herself.
After a brief chat, in
which I learn that she
was born and raised
in Portugal, and that
she’s been with karls-
sonwilker since 2011,
we get to discussing
the project.
“When we started
the job, all we knew
was that we were go-
ing to make a video for
the song “Crossfade”
and that we wanted to
explore the quirkiness
of 3D and some of the
media and technolo-
gies that were new at
the time, like Kinect
and motion capture.
Those were our start-
ing points.”
She continues:
“The next step was
drafting in Alex Czetwertynski, who is
very skilled at the whole 3D animation
thing, and planning a shoot with the
band. The idea was to gather material
for the video and hopefully the artwork,
too.”
When talking to anyone associated
with karlssonwilker, you get the sense
that one of the firm’s biggest emphases
is on exploration, improvisation and cre-
ative freedom. And the work on ‘Mexico’
was no exception. “We didn’t really have
a storyboard for the video when we
started shooting,” Sandra says. “We just
gathered a bunch of equipment, different
cameras and processes and spent an en-
tire weekend with the band at Jan’s place
in Greenpoint.”
“That whole weekend was a little bit
crazy. It was so hot—you know, ‘New
York hot,’ really humid and nasty—and
we were working from eight in the morn-
ing until eleven at night. The band had
to be in front of the camera with these
motion capture dots on their faces for
the whole duration, jumping and danc-
ing and acting super fresh, as if they
weren’t totally overheated and sweaty
and exhausted. It was kind of funny. We
wound up with hours and hours of raw
material that needed to be rendered and
processed, and that was the biggest part
of my job, taking that footage and explor-
ing it.”
EXPLORATION IS IM-
PORTANT
I ask if the process was comparable to the
other projects she’s done with the firm. “I
don’t think so,” she says. “We have a re-
ally free way of working, and we always
enjoy the process a lot. Most of the time
we don't know where it’s going to take
us or what kind of results we’re going to
get. That can be a bit hard, because you
don't foresee what's coming, you never
really envision a final product. With Gus-
gus, this was exponentially harder, even,
because we didn't really know what we
would do with all that raw footage we
had. We just wanted to explore it as much
as we could, and see what the outcome
would be.”
Going about it like that presented
tons of challenges, but also opportunity,
Sandra and Hjalti both confirm, a sort
of burden of freedom in the Sartrean
sense. But, they apparently withstood
the challenge. “Working on ‘Mexico’ was
the kind of experience where you learn
something new every day,” Sandra says.
“It was amazing, just to go in there every
Feature| Tourism
When we profiled New York design firm karlssonwilker
for our 2012 DesignMarch issue, one of the things we dis-
cussed was the need for graphic design and visuals, and
why people should pay them for what they do—what exact-
ly they bring to the table. Their response was resoundingly
simple, yet confusing:
“We can design something just right, but we can never
guarantee sales or success. See, most of what sells a prod-
uct is itself. If your CD is brilliantly designed, with great
artwork, but the music sucks, it will not sell. The opposite
is rather true, great music can sell in great numbers despite
being packaged horribly.”
Then, when we paid their Manhattan office a visit a year
ago, we found them hard at work on creating the visual as-
pect for a still-in-the-making album that was all but guar-
anteed to feature some pretty great music. The album in
question—Gusgus’ ‘Mexico’—finally saw release this June,
and it was accompanied by some intriguing design work
from the karlssonwilker team.
Having had the chance to follow the design process from
afar since the beginning, through visits and correspon-
dence, we felt it presented a great opportunity to further
delve into the purposes and processes of graphic design, to
try and understand how an established, respected firm like
karlssonwilker goes on about visually presenting a piece of
music and what that entails: how an idea moves from the
brainstorming stage to its final, tangible form and the chal-
lenges and triumphs experienced along the way.
Project:
Overload
Exploring the outskirts of
Mexico with karlssonwilker
Words by Haukur S. Magnússon
Photos by Karlssonwilker and Elizabeth Smolarz
How Does
Hjalti Do It?
In June, The Museum of Design
and Applied Art in Garðabær
(www.honnunarsafn.is) opened an
exhibit of Hjalti Karlsson’s work.
Entitled ‘This is how I do it,’ the
exhibit provides an overview of
Hjalti’s work through the years,
along with featuring portraits and
posters specifically made for the
occasion. The exhibit was initially
commissioned last year by Röhss-
ka, the Swedish Museum of Design
and Applied Arts in Gothenburg,
on the occasion of Hjalti being
awarded the prestigious Torsten
and Wanja Söderberg Prize. The
exhibit runs until October 5.
23
The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 14 — 2014