PinkFloyd ‘Wish You Were Here 50’

I was lucky enough to be involved in Sony’s release of Pink Floyd’s ‘Wish You Were Here 50’ reissue, celebrating the anniversary of the Landmark Album, which sold 20 million copies and often features on lists of the greatest albums of all time. For me it’s definitely up there with the best of them.

I was approached by maverick creative director/photographer/all-round legend Josh Cheuse, (see also ACDC ‘Power Up’ campaign) to help provide some general CG/animation/direction assistance with the super-exciting creative that he had put together.

This involved a lyric video for the release of ‘The Machine Song (Demo # 2 Revisited)’ and various renders for the album artwork, featured on Spotify and Youtube. I felt like I was let loose in a vinyl wrapped sweetshop working on this…and seeing it pop up on my Spotify playlists was like a shiny black liquorice bonus prize! It’s always great to get that call from Josh and it was great to help bring his vision alive this time… as with all the other times!

The original album artwork by Hipgnosis was famously wrapped in black vinyl, as referenced by Spinal Tap (None more black!! ) and Josh had created an entire campaign around this motif, using simple textual descriptions on top of the fetishistically christo-wrapped backdrop, which feels like a kind of anti-imagery. It’s quite arresting and in-your-face, just like the original campaign.

For ‘The Machine Song’, I had fun listening to interviews and immersiing myself in the iconography of Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell, as well as interviews with the band about the making of the song. It’s a very bitter, cynical, view of the music business, and so the final piece became a kind of hommage to the iconic image of the burning handshake, at first a simple study on the texture and then becoming something completely different… a hallucinogenic journey into the bleak, dark, surreal world behind it all.

The black latex/vinyl material used throughout the campaign was created in Style3d and Marvelous Designer and then modelled/lit/rendered in Maya. The lyric video, which used the same cloth assets, was built and rendered in Unreal Engine.