Everyday Robots - Damon Albarn creative director Aitor Throup

Aitor Throup creates visuals for Damon Albarn

Cutting edge designer featured in our book Pattern creates a new persona for Blur singer with Everyday Robots

Aitor Throup, one of the cutting edge designers featured in our fine book Pattern has just created the visuals for Blur singer Damon Albarn's first solo album, Everyday Robots, The album and the first single from it features artwork and a video by Throup - one of the 100 outstanding fashion designers selected by 10 of the field's leading professionals (designers, stylists, editors, educators, bloggers and writers) for the Pattern survey.

Throup says the work he created was inspired by the theme of portraiture, with the designer keen to show different elements of Albarn's character. The video for the single, also titled Everyday Robots, is a portrait of Albarn created in CGI. The album is out in April. You can watch Throup's video below.

 

Everyday Robots - Damon Albarn creative director Aitor Throup

“I spent a lot of time with Damon in the studio, and I really wanted to capture his intentions and messages while proposing a unique way to convey them visually," says Throup. "There are specific lyrics that strike me, and particularly his analysis of how we are at times like robots, everyday on our phones ‘looking like standing stones’. I was really interested in the idea of how the challenge of living with technology has turned us into repeats of the same. It’s a sort of individual statement on the loss of individuality through technology, done in a way that at the same time not only embraces it, but is dependent on it."

The video for Everyday Robots was created using the gaming industry 3D CGI programme ZBrush. More than the finished result it was the creative process that excited Throup and it's this that's featured in the video, where Throup's portrait of the singer is built from the skull outwards in synch with the song.

“When I saw the programme being used for the first time, I was fascinated by the interface of the programme itself, and the process of creating a final product within it," Throup told Creative Review. "I was more interested in the process that the programme offered than the eventual result. So that’s what we’ve captured – we’ve screen-captured an authentic digital sculpting process that wouldn’t normally be seen as an animation. It’s not an animation as such, it’s just a captured process."

 

Everyday Robots - Damon Albarn creative director Aitor Throup
Everyday Robots - Damon Albarn creative director Aitor Throup

"I really wanted to capture him in isolation, surrounded by nothingness," says Throup. "But I didn’t want him to pose. So in between shots when he wasn’t aware I was shooting, that’s really when I was taking the shots. The idea of giving him an identity, making him almost a brand was quite challenging."

Everyday Robots is out on April 28 featuring contributions from Brian Eno and Bat For Lashes. Check out Aitor Throup's website here and take a look at Pattern here. Meanwhile, for more on branding check out Michael Johnson's excellent Problem Solved and Damn Good Advice by George Lois