Radiohead Blip Tribute
The Story
So it goes like this. It’s 2001, my senior year at SCAD, and I’m taking a motion graphics class. Radiohead’s Kid A was just released in October of 2000, and I was blown away.
They promoted the album in an entirely new and unique way: lots of unconventional mini music videos called “blips” or “blipverts” scattered all over TV and the internet. These were produced by both Shynola and the Vapour Brothers (though not necessarily together). There are quite a few on the Vapour Brothers web site and a pretty thorough list over at Pulk-Pull.
With a final motion project to produce, I decided to create a blip of my own in tribute to the great work created for the real Kid A campaign. After making the video, I put it online and posted it on Radiohead fan sites. It got a surprising amount of traffic and a great response from the community.
Numerous others were also inspired by the “blipvert” campaign, and they too posted their videos.
But then the big surprise came when Chris Bran of the Vapour Brothers contacted me (and quite a few others) to see if it was all right to post the video on the official Radiohead website — which, of course, it was. The collection is still archived on their site today. You can head to the archived version of the Radiohead site and click on the glitchy pixel image at the top. This will launch a grid of thumbnails with all the community videos that were produced during this time period.
A while later, when Radiohead was touring the states, I got word from two friends who said the show was screening my video as part of a visual build-up before Radiohead came on. And thus ends my 15 minutes of fame.
The Other Stuff
I needed to create this page for two reasons:
- The quality of the versions floating around on the internet are small and horribly compressed, like this video on YouTube.
- Most of these versions are anonymously posted with no attribution.
So finally this piece has a home and has been re-rendered at its original 640×480 resolution. I’m also including scans of the original sketches / storyboards used to create the video.
