The theatrical production introducing the New Directors’ Showcase reel 2012 has been conceived for the second time by Saatchi & Saatchi's award-winning senior creatives Jonathan Santana & Xander Smith with the theme ‘Meet Your Creator'. The piece involves an army of tiny flying machines performing synchronised flight patterns and composing music through ‘live' light manipulation. The audience enters a brave new world of visual territory, with hovering Quadrotors buzzing around the stage in unison, and an angelic soundscape giving a feeling of otherworldliness. A single ray of light hits a glass pyramid, whilst a disembodied voice precludes a mesmerising performance by the Quadrotors, which move effortlessly around the stage as if by magic.
Marshmallow Laser Feast, a collective working at the intersection of art, design and technology, are the creative and technical directors of the theatrical production for the second consecutive year. Marshmallow Laser Feast are Robin McNicholas, Memo Akten and Barnaby Steel and crew. MLF collaborated with KMel Robotics and their incredible Quadrotors to develop the choreographic and lighting technology.
Marshmallow Laser Feast commented: "With this project, our aim was to create ethereal sculptures of light and sound. We're always excited by the prospect of appropriating new technologies and further developing them for artistic purposes. By customizing Quadrotors with LEDs and mirrors, and combining them with lights and other custom technology, we were able to choreograph the performance, pushing the experience to that of watching an abstract virtuoso being made of light, playing an imaginary musical instrument."
The bank of sounds created by underground electronic artist Oneohtrix Point Never, AKA Daniel Lopatin, are manipulated by Quadrotors, which in turn affect beams of light. Lopatin's introduction and minimalist compositions create a fluid environment when combined with the rays of light and Quadrotors. The pyramid was designed by Sam & Arthur.
CREDITS
Event concept created by.- Jonathan Santana & Xander Smith, Saatchi & Saatchi.
Producer.- Juliette Larthe.
Production Supervisor.- Holly Restieaux.
Show Directors.- Marshmallow Laser Feast – Memo Akten, Robin McNicholas, Barney Steel.
MLF Team.- Raffael Ziegler, Devin Matthews, Rob Pybus, James Medcraft.
Quadrotor Design & Development.- KMel Robotics.
Sound Design.- Oneohtrix Point Never.
Intro Music “Shine a Light” Spiritualized®.
Typography & Design.- Farrow Design.
Set Design.- Sam & Arthur.
Filmed by.- James Medcraft, Sandra Ciampone, Mike Tombeur.
Saatchi & Saatchi has grown from a start-up advertising agency in London in 1970 to a global creative communications company headquartered in New York, with 140 offices in 76 countries. Saatchi & Saatchi is part of the Publicis Groupe, the world’s third largest communications group.
Jonathan Santana and Xander Smith will join Saatchi & Saatchi in July from TBWA Paris where they have worked with Erik Vervroegen for three and a half years and one year respectively.
In 2007, Santana won the outdoor Grand Prix at Cannes and a D&AD yellow pencil for his work for Nedbank which saw the agency create the world's first solar-powered billboard to generate electricity to power a local school. In the same year, he won another gold at Cannes for the "Ghost Pops" poster campaign.
Smith also won two gold lions at Cannes for the Mapa "Sensitive Hands" print campaign and for the Sony PlayStation print campaign. He began his career as a copywriter at TBWA Hunt Lascaris in South Africa in 2001. Before moving to TBWA Paris, Santana spent seven years at Net#work BBDO in South Africa as an art director.
The pair's client experience includes Nissan, General Motors, PlayStation, South African Tourism, and Virgin Atlantic as well as a broad range of clients in the banking, broadcast, FMCG, public service and travel and tourism sectors.
Smith and Santana have worked together since 2007 when they met at TBWA Paris. They have 40 international and 27 South African awards between them.
Memo was born and grew up in Istanbul, Turkey. Fascinated by the hacker demo scene of the 1980s, he started programming music & graphics demos at an early age on the 8-bit computers of the era. In 1997, after completing a BSc in Civil Engineering, he moved to London where he worked in the video games industry as an artist, designer and programmer. Leaving the industry in 2003 to pursue more immersive experiences, he now balances his time between personal work, collaborations, research and commissioned projects.
He is a visual artist, director, musician and engineer working at the intersection of art and technology. Developing and appropriating new technologies, he explores processes of visualizing the invisible; extracting and amplifying the unseen relationships within images, space, movement, sound and time. Driven by the urge to make the seemingly impossible, possible; and awaken our childlike instincts to explore and discover new forms of interaction and expression; he invents new ways of creating and performing images and sound. His work ranges from live music/dance/theatre performances, large-scale immersive interactive installations, and music videos; to online works and mobile applications.
Selected exhibitions and performances include Victoria & Albert Museum (London), Royal Festival Hall (London), Queen Elizabeth Hall (London), Creators Project (New York, Sao Paulo, Beijing), Holon Museum (Tel Aviv), Garage Center for Contemporary Culture (Moscow), Sydney Biennale, Design Miami, Aldeburgh Music Festival, Edinburgh Film Festival, Mapping Festival (Geneva), Yota Space Festival (St. Petersburg), Glastonbury Festival and more.
