A week of madness began after the Christmas break at Edinburgh College of Art with the amazing Vis com masters students Huilin, Karly, Billy, Ziyao and Patrick who collectivly form Choklat Design Studio.

The brief was a collaboration between two design agencies to create: a band, the identity, the instruments, the outfits, the music, an animated music video, and promotional materials amongst other things!

The first day consisted of getting to know each member of Choklat. 4 out of 5 of the wonderful folks are from China, so a lot of their work is influenced by the culture they grew up with. Billy was the 5th member who comes from a background in geography, so quite the switch! We began with making some instruments out of the collection of found materials that we could record sounds with. The found materials being cereal boxes, pipes, plastic, carrots... anything we could get our hands on! We had a wealth of musical notation by the end of the day.

Day two was to be the splitting off into groups to tackle branding and costumes, and finishing off instruments. The branding team came up with the great name 'Pastel Junkies' to try to convey the weirdness of this brief, and the oddness of our instruments. The juxtaposition of the following was important: Pastel because that was the colour scheme we had settled upon to give a sense of calm (as is evident in our music video) and junkies because we love design. We live it, breathe it, thrive off of it. It's our drug! It was a quick turnaround for a name and concept, so once it was agreed upon, we ran with it. The logo was created by refining a unique hand illustrated skull (again, taking influence from rock bands) and hand made grungy typography in the glorious shades of pastel pink and blue.
The costumes team quickly found that designing an entire ensemble for 9 members would be difficult at best, so collectivly decided upon neutral clothing, accented with wacky masks (a la rock band Slipknot). They set to work using yet more found materials (theres a free junk shop!) to make uncomfortable looking masks, in a collection of calming pastel colours.
The instruments team did stellar work in finishing off guitars, drums, carrot and sweet potato flutes, marracas and more! Even giving them a coat of paint to tie in with the brand we had created.

Day 3 was the finalising of branding and costumes. (Rome wasn;'t built in a day y'know) With masks drying and branded stickers being printed, it was impressive to see the amound of work a group of people could get done in a day! We also managed to squeeze in a tour of the workshops at ECA and a museum trip!

Day 4 brought forth our recording adventures and photography studio time. We found the still and queit places of the ECA to get some silence to tune and record our instruments. A bit of a crash course in audio recording and we had the beginnings of a song! The photography studio was next, with each of us dressing head to toe in black and posing with masks and intruments to capture images for the promotional materials we'd need for the next stage. With pictures to edit, songs to create, motion graphics/ videos to produce, and social media to populate, it would be a busy few hours!

Day 5. This was the final push. We finalised the song with the help of Billy and his music editing software, to create the below tune. The motions graphics were largly handled by Patrick alone (although i'd like to point out we as an agency have brushed up our skills considerably since!). Social media and photography were proudly handled by Rianna and Sean from our team, to bring together a cohesive campaign to promote our band!