Daisy Chain

0:02Hello everyone. Thanks for coming. Um, my name is Connor. This is my friend and business partner, but first and foremost friend Harry. Uh, we um, yeah, we are Daisy Chain Studio, which um, yeah, it's really exciting to be here because I my first job out of uni was actually It's Nice That. So, shout out to Nice That crew. Um, so it's a very nice like full circle moment. Uh, and yeah, thank you for inviting us here. Um, before we get into it, in case you haven't heard of us, Daisy Chain is reasonably new.

0:36Um, we work across visual identities in motion. We do music videos for artists like JXX, uh, and Tame Impala. We do ad campaigns for big clients like Nike and Google, etc. Uh, and yeah, we also like to do energetic, playful, fun, silly projects in between. And we try to introduce as much storytelling as we can uh throughout because you know things are getting kind of serious. It's good to be silly, right? So yeah, that was a a brief intro to the work, but more importantly the here are the people behind it. So there's there's five of us now and on the next slide you'll see uh what we've been making recently.

1:17Shout out to the Daisy Chain crew by the way. I know you're here tonight. Got some whips over there. So yeah. [music] [music] [music] Where are you? [music] [music] [music] [music] [applause] Yeah. So, so like Connor said, Daisy Chains actually formed of of me and Connor coming together. Um, we had our own practices and it sort of birthed out of that finally after years of like professionally flirting with Connor, convinced him to to to to join forces.

2:51Yeah. Um, but yeah, I mean, here's a selection of our work before Daisy Shane over the last five or so years. Uh, basically Harry uh ran his own practice and so did I. And you can kind of see the moments uh taking center frame where we found a way to like make this official and collaborate. Um, and yeah, a quick bit about me. I'm from a very small island called Isle of Sky. Shout out to anyone from Isle of Sky here tonight.

3:21Always worth a try. Um, but yeah, there wasn't much going on there growing up. We didn't have internet. We had like three and a half channels. Uh but yeah, basically this was just a chance for me to uh escape to the world of Photoshop and make my own album covers for like Limewire downloaded uh iPod Nano Collect collection. Anyway, over to you Harry.

3:45I also grew up in a kind of remote area on a farm. Um it was a farm that had been in our family for a few generations. So my dad uh my granddad was working on the farm. pass it down to my mom who's working on the farm. And then age 16, you know, the implication came my way and I was like, "Mom, I want to be a graphic designer," which is the most annoying answer that you could give to that question. Um, and then went off and and did my own practice, but the theme is really that yeah, we both kind of had an isolated time developing niche interests in visual culture, which is coming up.

4:22So yeah, um I'm a big believer that uh your creative outputs are the sum of all your experiences. And obviously Harry and I as children growing up in the country in the '9s, early 2000s, um yeah, I think it was just uh really interesting to map this out. And I would kind of encourage anyone who's doing a collaborative practice to do this because there's some interesting little uh moments of crossover. So, we always like to say that while I was like sitting in my room watching like anime, Harry was watching Looney Tunes. Um, and there's kind of some interesting uh mannerisms that come out of that. Um, and when you really dig deep into what inspired you in childhood, you can draw

5:04these parallels. For example, this uh love that I have for Neon Genesis titles, but then also Harry's love of like surreal, creepy Fantasia dancing characters might have formed into this video we did for Julia. Um or our project for Google. Uh we created this full world in 3D. Uh and that's maybe drawing some inspiration from like Zelda Final Fantasy 7, but also some of these like really intense uh super extreme fisheye camera lenses.

5:35And one of the first 3D projects we did together was um yeah, building a 3D spaceship. Again, drawing from the same things. And um and then even now today, when we launched our studio a couple of years ago, we wanted to create a mascot for it. And still feeding into the work that we're making. Um just really briefly on how we launched our studio, we kind of wanted to create some characters that would represent us. Um, and you can see the mix of Connor's anime eyes and my obsession with shiny metallic uh textures. Um, and here are the final characters that uh we created to sort of represent us and they keep popping up in various ways.

6:18And yeah, when rigging a character, we always try to embody them first by acting out their movements. Um, for our mascots, we wanted them to be really simple with these big long ears, uh, that react to gravity as they kind of jump, sway, or they dance around. Um, and the ears actually end up being like the thing that shows all this emotion, right? So, their eyes are like just two dots, and the mouth or nose, as some people like to say, uh, is just like another little dot. So, the way that their ears stand up straight when they're, you know, really scared or surprised, uh, or droop down when they're really sad.

6:59And yeah, we've been further building out, uh, our worlds with these characters. It's kind of annoyingly what we're known for a lot of the time. We're like not just doing like cute little bunnies all the time, but we are actually doing like serious animation. But like, yeah, the Daisy verse is what I like to call it. Harry's sort of kind of, you know, is on the fence about it, but the Daisy verse is a thing. You know, you might see our little characters high in the mountains, uh, or deep in a cave picking mushrooms or gossiping with fish down by the by the stream. So, keep an eye out for them.

7:32Yes. So, there we go. That was a quick intro to us and how we present ourselves. Uh, we want to talk to you about one project tonight. Um, and it's from Crack Magazine. This is brand new. No one's seen this. It's coming out hopefully this month. Um, it's a commission film. Uh, it didn't start as a film. We kind of gently forced that onto them.

7:55Crack magazine for as a quick fill-in is a free music magazine. I think it's I think it's amazing. Uh, yeah, widely distributed around. Um, but they have a web shop and they just asked us, would you like to do some merch for our web shop? The brief was really simple. We got the email which said, yeah, a create chance to be creative and experiment. Uh, so we kind of went a bit we kind of ran away with that a little bit. We were like, well, why don't we make a whole film instead?

8:27And if we're making a film, maybe we should do a poster and we've been talking about making an exhibition and then at the end you can get your merch, but like let us have fun. Uh, so we began to build our world and I think part of why we wanted to make a film was because yes, we could do merch which just said like crack on a t-shirt, but what for? So, we wanted to do it in a bit of an opposite way where you might get a campaign that releases some clothes and then a marketing film comes out later which is like inspired by the clothes. We wanted to reverse that and build a film and then create merch from it. So, what is the film going to be about? Well, we felt like Crack magazine

9:10was really good at being a bit of a mirror of like contemporary culture through music. And if we really thought about today now creating something that had a really visceral emotional response, we personally think that like disgust is one of the main things driving it through contamination through animal to human contamination, smoking, blood, body horror. And you can kind of see this in the way that we're consuming culture at the minute. So, the way how the substance was sort of doing straight rips of the 70s body horror.

9:48Uh, the like the looks maxes and the sort of morbid curiosity with that. Brian Johnson injecting his son's plasma to stay alive forever. And then for me, the most disgusting thing which makes me want to wash my hands and my mouth is the live crabs on the New York subway that someone was taking home to make dinner.

10:09[sighs] Um, yeah. So, as I mentioned, Harry and I love storytelling. We try to find ways of bringing to life a character within a world. And we ask ourselves questions like, "How was their childhood? What kind of music are they into? How does their internet search history look?" Uh, you know, just part of the job, I guess. Um, and so we landed on, pardon the pun, a fly as the main character.

10:37Uh, and we subverted this kind of ignored and very hated creature often overlooked as a member of society. There's no fairy tales about flies. Uh, you know, what if we gave it the limelight? What if we gave it its own story? And so, yeah, we started to build our fly. Um, I'm going to spare you the video of me and Harry uh pretending to be a fly. [laughter] Ask us after at the pub. Um, we added in disgusting motion details, of course.

11:13Uh, but yeah, we have to make it lovable, right? It's, uh, it's our main character. It can't be totally disgusting. So, make it cute. Uh, and yeah, I guess this is a little insight into our process. We love to iterate, especially we're trying to find this balance of how disgusting can we make this guy. Uh, he's our main character.

11:33He's cute, but he is a disgusting fly at the end of the day. Um, and yeah, maybe we were kind of like, uh, okay, there should be like maggots bouncing around him. Uh, maybe the maggots are too bouncy. What if he's physically like pouring maggots out of his body continuously? Um, you know, it's just like an average date chain worrying about these things. Um, and and whilst we're showing you some behind the scenes, I thought we'd like pause on this animatic of the scene. Right. I really hope you take this home with you, this image.

12:06Trigger warning for the smokers, by the way. I think as an animator, my slash all of our dreams is if you exaggerate something to the point that it affects how you experience the real world. So, for example, every time I sit down in like a really comfy chair, I think back to this very small minor scene in a Disney film I watched as a kid where a character falls into this like amazingly comfy chair and it makes it better for me. Um, and I just had the idea of like, uh, if there's one person that watches this film and is worried that when they take a big drag of a cigarette, a nearby fly might gets

12:47caught in and in down their throat. Um, that would be a success for us. We're always trying to add drama. And the other good thing about animation is you can, you know, envision the impossible like a camera pulling all the way back down the throat. Yeah. You got to get the body horror in there to just double down on the disgustingness of this film. Um, but yeah, of course, we got really carried away with our disgusting little protagonist and what he was doing and we were like, "Oh [ __ ] we actually have to somehow make this say crack at some point." Um, so yeah, we were kind of alongside building out the environments uh and the character uh we began building out parts of the logo

13:29reveal which uh yeah took us on this journey of looking at disgusting kind of fluid gross shapes that could form it, looking at like what old punk bands do with their records. Um and of course taking any chance to get off the screen. Um, we started to work up the crack identity using ink which gave us this really slimy slimy gross feeling. Um, and here are some of the results. We're really loving these kind of drips of ink that had, you know, the type was kind like bleeding into it itself slightly illeible. Uh, and you get these like bubbly large spldes which we used as a kind of basis to take into 3D and create

14:07using VR. So, the great thing about VR is that you can just kind of pull and shape this uh I guess like inky clay um and then land on something that resembles the logo, but you still get these kind of like bulbous areas to it. But this still wasn't disgusting enough. So, we had to drop it from a height. Uh we wanted it to feel like a wet splat like you can almost like hear it um against this like kind of hard surface.

14:37Um, and yeah, here's our final lockup complete with pink slime material. Uh, kind of Ghostbusters 2 resemblance there, which I'm kind of into, but you know. Um, and yeah, for the first time ever, I just want to play our final film. Um, so here it is. Heat. [music] Heat. [music] [applause] Thank you. It's not um it's not very often that you get to um do a branded film that ends with the logo being created out of sick. So, okay, that was the film and then yeah, they they got their merch in the end. Um um yeah, so we were just really excited to kind of do big blocks of meat on the back of a t-shirt. I don't know if anyone's experienced this before, but when you

15:54create a piece of artwork for a t-shirt, you sort of stick it on and then it's like, yeah, it's like on a square with hard edges. So, we didn't really like that. We created these custom meat borders for some of the scenes as the fly kind of stares directly down the camera at you. Uh, and this one, we we don't know how this one's going to sell.

16:17We only got a hundred of these just in case, but it's a meat infected cigarette with a Malra bootleg daisy chain logo. So, they're coming out soon. I urge you all to please buy them. Please buy these. Um, is the last scene the end? Yeah. So, that's uh that's our brand new projects. Um, thank you so much for listening.