When you rummage through your own past creative work, you occasionally stumble upon something you had forgotten about, yet a piece that still holds some powerful memories. And I mean powerful memories beyond “Oh, that client was a nightmare” or “Remember tracing outlines in those 250 frames?”. This piece was done as a promotion of our experimental design studio skop, as part of the KungFaux DVDs.
I wonder if people that are younger than 30 years and not from East Germany would find the language of the voice over funny. I don’t mean German itself (a hilarious language, I know!) but the style of the official GDR government language. At their time of glory, it was exactly like that. All their economic, technological or cultural achievements were “auf Weltniveau” (“on world-level”). So we thought Skop (being Berlin-based and with 50% of their workers drafted from the former Eastern part) should be delivering “elektronische Unterhaltung auf Weltniveau”. Somehow the clunky pompousness of the German words don’t translate too well into English: “electronic entertainment on world-level” might actually be EA‘s new tag line.
Anyway, I still see my comrade Peter standing in the toilet of our studio, hunched over the in-built microphone of his Powerbook, in order to make the sound extra dodgy. Very little post-production I must confess.
The KungFaux producer Mike Neumann got in touch with us after we had done the “I know where Bruce Lee Lives” remixer. Subsequently I interviewed him on a podcast for Neue Digitale. We also did a short promo movie about said remixer, again for the DVDs, summing up the KungFu mayhem in motion.
KungFaux itself was an early mash-up of game style graphics, urban music and trash-talk dubbing of martial arts movies. I think I might have caught a repeat on ABC2 and on some cable channel here in Australia.
Some of the slang being used by the featured rap artists in them is quite beyond me, we really should have done a translate-the-trailer back then. We could have beaten Host by at least 4 years!!
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