Worst nightmare ever. What a rusty nail in the ass… And it just gets worst every day. Anti.creative work, bizarre workflow and… well… just be careful of zombies wandering around at their headquarters. Such boring handbook people, for christ sake…
However, things were quite different when I started working with them.
I was working as a bartender in 2007 and my dearest room mate Jorge was already working at Lightsound, just about to install DSGL first LED banner display ever, in Barcelona (they have over 100 of them these days). He managed to get a copy of the video someone else had prepared for this store. Espionage, ladies and gentlemen. Showed it to me, told me he thought it was rubbish (I agreed back then; kinda like it nowadays…) and encouraged me to have a version of my own ready to show David Meyer (you know, one of Meyer brothers, who was in charge of… never really knew what his position was at the time).
So… he seemed to like my clip a lot. Well, not sure if it was my work or me… I mean, we instantly got along very well. Whatever… I took the train anyway.
I wanted to give the piece a coherent speech, identity… Good lord… What a crap! Did it entirely on Flash… Say no more.
But those were very exciting times for me, as it was my first chance to go literally public: banner display would aim right at the Ramblas. So I carried on working as a freelance video-designer for little less than a year on their first two LED displays (Barcelona and London), then got approached by Lightsound…
At some point Desigual decided to use LED displays as giant retrolighting billboards… They would name these displays things like “jumbotron”, “panaflex”…
Creative video work was over for displays at stores. They wouldn’t have the first clue of what a LED display is…
However, David Meyer and his crew would still travel around the world mounting a DSGL party booth at every top level fashion convention there is on earth. Music, lighting, ham and video. He would always carry some LED display along, so special contents for these events were handed to me by David.
Berlin Bread&Butter 2010 was definitely the only fun project. A blend of 3D visuals creation and live VJing (further info, please click here).
On the other hand, the only challenging store project was Preciados. DSGL would rent an entire old building in a key zone of Madrid, and wanted to make windows come alive by placing some LED displays all over the main facade. It would have been a shame just to play the same video on each display, so I managed to get CAD blueprints of the building to start working on it just using After Effects for the entire piece.
With this as reference, I came up with a single video that would treat the whole wall as a giant broken screen, taking into account the architecture of it. Video itself was very simple, but visual impact was strong: at that time, they would have a video featuring, basically, jumping people.
Selected best jumping seqs, framed them right into front facade balconys and voilá: giant models inside the building jumping around.
Proud of it.
Too bad the whole thing was actually illegal… Ha! Yes! Regulations wouldn’t allow this kind of visual pollution in that area of Madrid… The whole LED facade was removed, and with it the only interesting DSGL store project was over…