Paperdoll, after bringing down the house yet again.

PaperDoll, independent NYC musicmakers and dear friends of The Anthem Groups, have struck again! Here’s their second video for the nationally-televised smash “If Nothing Happened,” produced by Restless Films and directed by Court Dunn (www.courtdunn.com)

We think this makes it a better time than ever to revisit our own version of the video, and the design process behind it.

Starting the project, our most important consideration was Time. PaperDoll had fortuitously found themselves with the opportunity to get the song nationwide exposure as part of a DayQuil commercial that would air on major cable outlets, including Comedy Central and Spike. The ad had a set date for its premiere airing, and thusly our deadline also fell near that date. We had previously done a fully animated video for the band’s song “Anything At All,” but the time crunch imposed on this project made doing another animated piece unfeasible; Our solution was to follow in the footsteps of one of the most monstrously important and influential of all music video pioneers: The Strokes.

Though there is some performance footage of the band present in the video, the bulk of it is stitched together from vintage TV and movie clips, documentary films, commercials, and other visual ephemera. Enough correlation exists between the video’s images to maintain some sort of forward momentum, but the thematic vagueness of the flow of images allows the song’s energy and texture to remain the focal point. Especially for a song whose title and lyrics express confusion and immobility, the barrage of mood-buoying pictures more than anything else accentuate the personality of the song, without being distracting. Their technique seemed an inspired solution for our spur-of-the-moment assignment. By using copyright-free material produced by third parties, we would save ourselves the time needed to generate original assets (time we simply did not have), without sacrificing our ability to provide an effective video foil to PaperDoll’s song.

Our first step was to decide on an approach. The major connective tie between The Strokes’ song and its video was the parallel between the song title (”Hard To Explain”, as also heard in the song’s chorus) and the capricious, searching dynamism of the video’s imagery. Thanks to careful and expressive lyrics, PaperDoll’s song had a much more cohesive theme than The Strokes’, but it was unlikely we’d be able to create an equally coherent visual counterpart quickly enough. So a more general relationship to the song would have to be found. Our song was entitled “If Nothing Happened.” Much of our source material would be from vintage sci-fi and horror flicks, with lots of drama, explosions, and overwrought faces bearing extreme expressions; in broader terms, lots of Things Happening. Perfect!

Thanks to Mill Creek’s mammoth public-domain movie box sets, we already had hundreds of hours of available footage at our disposal. Cheap cartoons, japanese monster movies, weird commericals, and silents were sifted through for their most exciting seconds, which were then sheared off and sewn into the fabric of our moving collage. For movie buffs like us, getting to massage snippets of familiar schlock staples like Creature From the Haunted Sea and The Revenge of Dr. X into a framework that supported PaperDoll’s great song was an uncommonly pleasurable task.

Only about a weekend was spent corralling workable bits of film from DVD onto our desktops. Darius Hill, veteran Anthem animator, handled directorial duties, exercising his nearly superhuman understanding of the laws of film to re-edit the hours of unrelated, scruffy, obscure video into an actual statement that both we and PaperDoll could be proud of. Timing had to be worked out; clips were synced up to the words of the song via labyrinthine, arcane correlations between the two (Metropolis‘ Rotwang the Inventor indignant intonation that he’s made a robot that never makes mistakes occurs as PaperDoll audibly explains “Everybody makes mistakes”; and later, one of Gumby’s robotic domestics goes haywire, wreaking prophesied havoc on his neighborhood.) Shots were carefully organized to draw the viewer’s eye from one edge of the screen to the other and back again, leading you into the next shot with natural ease.

From inception of the project to delivery, Darius and his team completed the project within one week. Inspiration joined forces with hard work, passion for cinema, love of pop culture, and love of pop music, to hurriedly produce a suitable counterpoint to an expertly crafted tune. The result:

Let’s do it again sometime!

Matthew Pulling Anthem, Projects Movies, Music, PaperDoll, YouTube

I came across this amazing branding of a product while having tea with my grandmother.

The package was a gift to her , it came with six (6) tea bags.  It is black tea with a smidgen of jasmine green tea.

Its decent, had a good taste. I enjoyed it, but then again I enjoy the black tea from Target, in which a I paid $1.50 for 100 tea bags.

Our delicious 6 bag black tea escapade? Apparently, $48.00.

Its pretty cool, that packaging can add so much value to a solid product.
The tea is not bad by any means, it tastes great, but it went from $3.00 for a pound to $48.00 great. (Thats 8 bucks per bag).

Check out Tea Forte. Their strap line even says it, “Extraordinary Tea. Enchanting Presentation.”
It goes to show you, the battle is partly having a good product and the other part making sure your customer psychologically sees your product as high class.

Shawn Borsky - The Boss Anthem

Yikes!


Unstoppable rising stars of the New York rock scene PaperDoll and unstoppable design wunderkinds Anthem have joined forces once again, this time with the psyche-infecting new video for PaperDoll’s next big hit, “If Nothing Happened”. Watch it and feel your perception of all reality be permanently expanded!!



The video is crafted entirely from footage yanked out of public domain classics like “Attack Of The Monsters”, “Alien Contamination”, “Creature From The Haunted Sea”, and “The Revenge Of Dr. X”.

Anthem’s in-house auteur D.Scott directed, with compilation duties aided by hoity-toity cineastes Matt Pulling and Richmond Lee. It’s release was timed to capitalize upon the appearance of “If Nothing Happened” in the recent Dayquil “Snowball Fight” ad as seen on Comedy Central, SpikeTV, and others.

This the official follow up to Anthem’s equally awe-inspiring previous video for PaperDoll, “Anything At All”. Watch it in Hi-Def, or on Paperdoll’s YouTube channel, where lots of other great performances by the band are also available.

Matthew Pulling Anthem Anthem, Movies, Music, PaperDoll, YouTube

This chart is funny, because its actually quite accurate.

I wanted to make a quick post for other web developers to enjoy it.
Also for non web developers to understand why most of us really hate IE, its nothing personal, it just makes our job harder and forces any work we do to take 3 times longer.

…Okay, I guess making our job harder and more frustrating makes it personal.

Shawn Borsky - The Boss Anthem, Anthem Labs (Development) Anthem, IE, web development

This weekend the Anthem crew headed outdoors for some do it yourself fruit picking.  Throughout the year, many farms throughout the US will open their doors to visitors, letting them pick fruit for exceedingly low prices.  They’re often referred to as “pick your own” or “u-pick” farms. It’s a great way for smaller growers to make some extra income, and it’s the best way to get incredibly fresh fruit for a fraction of market price.  Everybody wins!

We decided to head out to Briar Patch Farm, located in Dacula Georgia (that’s “Da-Cue-La”, not “Dracula” minus the “r”) since they were one of the only farms in the area that still had some blueberries.  July is the peak blueberry season, and has even been declared National Blueberry Month by the USDA (not to be confused with Boo Berry Season, which peaks on the 31^st of October).

When looking for a good place to pick fruit, it’s best to call ahead for availability. Popular farms tend to get cleaned out very quickly since the early bird gets the worm. If possible, you should head out early in the season, and early in the day.  The folks are Briar Patch Farm were very gracious and easy going, and it was a very pleasant low key experience.  Basically, you show up, they give you a bucket, and you’re on your way.  They had warned us ahead of time that most of the berries had already been picked, though there were still some ripe ones to be had if we rummaged carefully.

Sure enough, when we got there most of the berries left on the trees were unripe.  It felt like slim pickings at first, but we quickly got the hang of it.  I found it was best (as with many things in life) to approach the trees from unusual angles, and often times I’d see plenty of berries that had flown under the radar of less discerning eyes.  Once you spot one, tons of them suddenly come out of the woodwork (I felt like I was seeing the Matrix).

When picking blueberries, it’s important that you only pick the ripe ones which are a deep blue or purple color.   Picking unripened berries severely cuts down on the year’s available harvest.  A lot of farms have closed down early this year for this reason.

Blueberries have some of the highest brand equity among fruit.  Mention blueberries to anyone health conscious and they’ll be sure to respond “that’s one of the healthiest things you can eat!”  This is because they’re absolutely jam packed with antioxidants, and they taste great to boot.

The blueberries at Briar Patch were genuinely organic with no pesticides since they’re already very naturally pest resistant (there wasn’t a single bug bite on any blueberry in the orchard).  Blueberries have a high concentration of flavonoids, an antioxidant compound that repels insects and microbes and also gives them their deep blue color.  Recent studies have shown that the ingestion of flavonoids found in blueberries may also lower cholesterol, fight cancer, improve memory and help to prevent Alzheimer’s.

By the end of the day, we had collected a full gallon of blueberries, which only came out to $7! If you go by the average supermarket price of $3/4oz, then a gallon of blueberries would cost $96!  That’s THIRTEEN times more than what we paid (And they wouldn’t be nearly as fresh either)!!

When we got back home we made a pretty rockin’ Cobbler with just a small fraction of the berries.  It was one of the freshest tasting pastries I’ve ever met.

The U-pick experience was a ton of fun and we recommend it to anyone.  It’s a fun, memorable experience that yields delicious souvenirs for weeks to come!

You can find a participating farm near you at the following website:

http://www.pickyourown.org/

Happy picking!

Richmond Lee Anthem, Around the Office, Food & Fun anthem recipes, Food & Fun, office hijinks

Have you heard of James Jean?  While you might not have heard of him, chances are more than likely that you’ve seen and enjoyed his work. Among his list of well-known clients of various walks are: Prada, Target and Koji Igarashi (The creator of Castlevania). One of his starting gigs was the covers to Fables. Much to our delight, a finely crafted book gathered his gorgeous cover works during his run with Vertigo.

His work is of immense joy to behold, a blend of just the right amounts of classical rendering skills, a playful but mature illustrative sensibility with an international influence. The result of this is a timelessly enjoyable collection of work.The book holds itself to a high standard; it’s a huge format, it’s got solid binding, is printed on a high quality paper and a lot of care was put into the layout of the book. The sketches also provide a slight insight into his process in crafting the covers. It’s definitely an excellent thing to have if you’re a fan.

If you aren’t familiar w

ith James Jean’s work or is curious about his work, do take the time to visit his excellent portfolio @ www.jamesjean.com

The residents of Anthem office are happy and proud owners of James Jean’s Fables Covers Collection.

Weigy W. Samakoen - Aesthetic Enthusiast Anthem Art Books., Fables, James Jean

Forbes comments on the creative community.

Normally, I am pretty chill about magazines when reporting on subjects they do not understand. But, I feel like I need to comment on this article by Forbes, because

a) Forbes is a respected (and well branded) magazine.

b) They seem to have missed the point, since they take advantage of such creative services themselves!

I first saw this on David Airey’s  blog, a fantastic logo designer in his own right.  I am reiterating a lot of what he posted and most of the design community agrees with.

Essentially, this is not a new problem. Speculative work has been an issue in the design industry for sometime. see the NO!SPEC movement.

Forbes has posted a poorly researched and unbalanced look at the subject.  Are we supposed to be okay, with people telling us that design and development is easy and that anyone can do it? As many have said similarly, having Microsoft Word does not make you a writer anymore than having Photoshop makes you a designer. The design business is an industry that requires expertise and skill to excel in, and it is highly valuable. Why is it ridiculous to ask a fair price for it?

Look at Forbes themselves, I guarantee that did not get their brand, commercials, and website for a couple hundred dollars or before they signed a contract and retainer. It’s almost a double standard.

This article states that

“Now if you live in India or Peoria you can buy a computer and sophisticated software for a little bit of money and compete with big agencies–and they don’t like that.”

That’s amazing, I would love to know how you can get sophisticated design software for “a little bit of money”.

We are not a “big agency”, but I can tell you that I don’t like it either. CrowdSpring is based on the concept of essentially hundreds of designers working and 1 getting paid.  I apologize, agencies like us are definitley at a disadvantage because we pay our designers for their work.

I am mostly reiterating posts made by the design community but I think it is important that people realize that this is not an acceptable way to do business.

Here is a great post on the Logo Factory’s blog

Shawn Borsky - The Boss Anthem, Around the Office, Logos & Branding

Hello -

This is the Anthem Blog. The Anthem Groups is a game and website design firm, we wanted to share our fun, failures, successes, breakthroughs, and goofiness with the world. Plus, some of it is interesting…

If you are considering hiring Anthem, we invite you to look around our blog and get to know us, because we want to get to know you.

You can check back here, subscribe to our RSS feeds, or even subscribe to Text message updates for recipes on good food, cool experiments we are doing with Flash, AJAX, PHP, etc, Fun stuff from around the office, cool new (Non Confidential) Projects, cool art, bad art, good art, video games and the creative antics we get ourselves into.

The blog catalogs the culture and approach of Anthem and our love for what we do.

Thanks for stopping by and:
Enjoy.

Shawn Borsky - The Boss Anthem