4 days later, and am still buzzing from the Elefant Traks vs Dr Seuss show at the Sydney Opera House.
Developed and performed for the Graphic Festival – it was an audacious project – inside a tiny time frame, create 18 songs and animations to reinterpret or remix the books of Dr.Seuss for the stage. It never felt like enough time – and yet, the amazing zoo / crew at Elefant Traks pulled it together and nailed a dynamic audiovisual smorgasbord (that apparently had some of the Seuss publishing folk moved to tears!).
My role was to develop and live trigger the animations for the show, which was akin to developing a feature film in 6 or so weeks.. while liasing with around 20 different musicians… “hey man, I’ve got this new idea for a beat / I’ll get you those lyrics soon.. etc etc” – so I wasn’t surprised to find myself still rendering out clips on stage, right up to the last minute.
I’m going to put up some more animation info later, over at skynoise.net/projects, but for now, while still floating, I wanted to put out a huge thank you to:
– Jono ‘Dropbear‘ Chong + Darin Bendall, who did an amazing job, animating half of the tracks between them.
– Urthboy – who oversaw the crazy production, as well as performed throughout the show
– Unkle Ho, who helped tie together the visual production, and developed his own flash-based interactive visuals for the show, AV jamming on a wii-board to Green Eggs & Ham, with Jim from Sietta + Angus from Hermitude.
– Luke Snarl Dearnley, who did a stellar job as technical producer, keeping the whole show smooth as butter.
– Owen Field, who covered all the logistics with grace and calm…
And that list could go on and on – there were endless Elefants who who were such a pleasure to collaborate with…
Some Elefant clips:
X-Continental, a clip I did for the Herd back in 2001.
Urthboy, Ozi Batla, Solo, The Tongue and L-FRESH: Cipher at the Opera House
and below, Dropbear’s fantastic animation for ‘And To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry st’, which was performed as the first track of the show, by Urthboy, Jane Tyrrell + Angus from Hermitude. Ozi Batla had just given his show-intro in an aviator costume, and hooded Urthboy came on to do a quick rap about Dr Seuss, before pulling back the hood as the lights came up, the decks started up, and MCs roamed the stage with this as backdrop: