Hi-ReS: Fragments of Imagination
There’s something beautiful about things that are slightly broken: a film that flickers, a song that skips a beat, a story with a missing page. It’s an aesthetic that London-based interactive agency Hi-ReS! incorporates in unexpected ways in their digital campaigns for Sony, Warner Bros., MTV and Bacardi, to name a few — not to mention websites for artists such as Beck, Goldfrapp and Massive Attack.
Hi-ReS! builds its intriguingly imperfect, immersive experiences with the help of Mac applications such as Adobe Creative Suite, Final Cut Studio, Logic Studio and Autodesk Maya. “The Mac puts everything in one place”, says Hi-ReS! Creative Director Florian Schmitt. “Especially with the new MacBook Pro, for the first time we have the power to do anything anywhere. Be it After Effects, Maya or Logic, it all runs — sometimes all at the same time”.
From a clue-filled website for the television series Lost to Dolce & Gabbana’s current online collection, the agency’s exquisitely flawed worlds invite endless exploration. “Obviously there are times when it’s all about things functioning”, says Schmitt. “But when things don’t work, sometimes they seem the most alive”.
Mac for Interactive
Schmitt and Alexandra Jugovic, his wife and creative partner, founded Hi-ReS! in 1999. Previously, the two had worked in film, fine art, product design, and 3D graphics, primarily on Silicon Graphics machines. When Schmitt — who is also a musician — signed a record deal with an English label, the couple relocated from their native Germany to London.
Schmitt and Jugovic began to explore new ways to use their collective skills, using Macs to create Flash projects like soulbath.com, an edgy, experimental website that attracted international media attention. The site also caught the eye of filmmaker Darren Aronofsky, who had recently released the cult hit Pi. He gave the nascent agency its first commercial project: designing a site for his film Requiem for a Dream.
“The whole malfunction thing was something that resonated with him”, says Schmitt. “He said, ‘This idea of things falling apart and not working — that’s very much what my film’s about’”. Hi-ReS! has since created websites for several other films, including Donnie Darko, Night at the Museum and Aronofsky’s 2006 feature The Fountain.
Macs have been essential to the agency’s growth, says Schmitt: “Going from a Silicon Graphics environment to something much more contained and accessible was instrumental in turning a more or less experimental partnership of two into a team of nearly 20”. The studio now relies on a combination of Mac Pros, MacBook Pros and iMacs — and Schmitt’s newest acquisition, a MacBook Air. “It’s perfect for me”, he says. “I carry it back and forth every day and hardly notice it”.
He also appreciates the power and portability of his MacBook Pro. “I used to work on a G5, and I bought a MacBook Pro to have a portable machine”, he says. “It quickly became clear that it was so much faster than my desktop that I hooked it up to my 23” screen and started using it as my primary computer. For the first time, I have everything I need in one portable device, allowing me to do everything from graphics to pretty heavy 3D”.
The Cabinet of Visions
Many Hi-ReS! projects seem like peepholes into other, more mysterious worlds. One example is a campaign the agency created for Diesel jewellery, which explores the handiwork of Monsieur Rousseau-Fontaine, a fictional jeweller in a realm reminiscent of Jean Cocteau and Joseph Cornell.
On the initial Diesel “Cabinet of Visions” website, a wavering black-and-white title sequence evokes classic Surrealist films. Viewers are invited to open drawers in an ornate chinoiserie cabinet, revealing the treasures inside. Around the cabinet, animated rose petals fall, accompanied by an eerie, looped soundtrack, which Schmitt composed and mixed in Logic.
“All the animation is a mixture of simple cutouts and things put together in After Effects”, Schmitt says. “And we created the flickering in Flash by setting a random alpha value on every frame”.
A subsequent site showcases Diesel’s holiday jewellery collection through a virtual pop-up book that tells a fractured tale of true love, dragons and knights via text, voiceover and animated cutout images. “We decided to expand on Rousseau-Fontaine’s universe”, says Schmitt. “We imagined that he had written a Christmas story, and we tell the story through the jewellery”.
At first, the designers contemplated creating a real pop-up book and shooting it in stop-motion. “But we realised that would be insanely complex, so instead we did the whole thing in 3D, modelled in Maya”, says Schmitt. After creating initial layouts in Photoshop, they transferred the elements into Maya, rebuilt the scenes as three-dimensional layouts, then animated everything in Flash.
