Once again I’m sitting around waiting for a video render to finish: I’m working on the second part of Damian Lazarus’ visuals, which will be played in full for the first time this thursday in Stockholm. I consider this to be the second beginning of his world tour, as so far he has only been performing half of his set.

Anyway, I’ve been staring at the render progress bar for far too long, so I decided to upload a little Flash toy I made to be used in Damian’s visuals, the “Random Shape Generator”.

…it does exactly that! open it up

A Pret A Manger has opened directly beneath the studio, securing yet another brutal mark in the heart of Shoreditch. I feel ashamed to say that I love their coffees, and religiously buy one each morning before walking up through their staff back door into my office’s corridor; however the other night as I left work to head home I saw some perfectly hydrated youths urinating on Pret’s glass front door, and I couldn’t help but smile.

Leaving work late at night happens quite often, so I get to see a few interesting scenes on the street. For example I get to witness the progression of the “girl’s night out”: the night begins with the wonky-walking stilettos in heavy makeup, then gracefully moves on to wonky-walking with stilettos in hand, ending with sitting on the pavement, makeup splattered all over the face yelling obscenities at no-one in particular (or down the phone). The “boy’s night out” isn’t as glamorous and nowhere near as captivating.

Anyway, this track was inspired by such Shoreditch happenings, while the Pret A Manger logo glared at me from the reflections in the windows on the other side of the road. Ah, Shoreditch.

During my incredibly busy times working on video-based projects for Damian Lazarus I managed to squeeze in a nice little web project for Skin, who I’ve got to know through Smokin Jo. While talks of a website for her Format 3 project are still being made, Skin also asked me to build a brand new website for the return of Skunk Anansie.

I remember telling a few people in LA about this fairly big news piece, but to my surprise they had never heard of the band. Is that just an LA thing? I found it quite intriguing.

Anyway, I don’t know how much I can say about what’s happening exactly with the band (apart from the fact that they’ll be playing at the Water Rats tonight and tomorrow), so I’ll just stick to explaining my side of things briefly: I brought in talented designer Casper Franken from Shotopop to art direct the whole project, and I’ll be taking care of the “creative development” (that is my job title, after all).

The holding page is up right now, and the full site should be live towards the beginning of May, so take a look: skunkanansie.net.

The photo above is by James Mountford.