Double Vision. For a documentary on pollution, Loyalkaspar makes a bittersweet comment on the purity of youth and the impact of industry.
David Herbruck and partner Beat (pronounced Bay-ott) Baudenbacher launched Loyalkaspar, a design boutique, with two PowerBooks, an iPod and a brief conversation:
Herbruck: How much can you afford for office space?
Baudenbacher: $250?
So they rented desks.
Today, just two years later, the partners, who met during creative runs at the Attik, a brand communications company, operate a thriving studio in the SoHo neighborhood of New York with a staff of six, a bank of Power Mac G5s and a growing reputation for innovative work in high-definition motion graphics.
“HD has a much wider canvas than NTSC — nearly six times the area — so we can design edge to edge. We don’t have to limit ourselves to making sure the focus is in the center of the screen.”
One of their projects, the brand identity for Equator HD, a new travel channel on the VOOM HDTV service, includes a series of 10-second IDs that look more like living paintings than station tags.
How to Launch a Business: “How much can you afford for office space?” asked David Herbruck (left). “250?” replied Beat Baudenbacher.
Showing Off in HD
“One of our mantras for VOOM was to create a brand identity that would show off HD technology,” says Herbruck. “HD has a much wider canvas than NTSC — nearly six times the area — so we can design edge to edge. We don’t have to limit ourselves to making sure the focus is in the center of the screen.”
Baudenbacher adds: “The other aspect of working in HD is the resolution. In high-def we can use color, really fine lines and photo-realistic textures and details that make the work much more interesting. In NTSC you get anti-aliasing and banding when you try to be too delicate.”
Discovery Process
To create the lush, almost liquid montages in the Equator HD spots, Herbruck and Baudenbacher often started with their own digital stills and video footage, then transformed them in Illustrator, Photoshop, After Effects and Final Cut Pro.
The purpose of the IDs is to give viewers a sense of different cultures. One spot paints a mini-portrait of what might be Ireland — but, with its rich greens and suggestions of ancient stones, it could just as easily be New Zealand, Cambodia or Thailand. Another suggests northern regions — Greenland, Canada, the Arctic.
“In all of the spots, we wanted the motion and action to be subtle and evolve slowly so it allowed viewers to experience their own discovery process — much like traveling itself,” Herbruck says.
To create the movement of the talent and some of the other organic elements in the spots, the duo shot sequential frames with a digital camera, then animated them in After Effects. The staccato, stop motion feel adds to the spots’ fragmented, dreamlike quality.
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