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Hello, we are HKI - Hellohikimori,
an independant studio based in Paris,
and we've been on the scene for almost 9 years.
We're based in the 4th district, and we specialize in graphic design,
motion design, directing.
Nathalie and I met about 15 years ago, at a communications agency.
We worked together more and more as our pitches met with more success,
and we were doing a lot of the creative work on them.
Naturally, with time, we wondered if we shouldn't be focusing less
on our jobs, and more on what we enjoyed instead. So, we got the idea to leave the ad agency and start something together.
We had an appointment two days later with a client,
and we didn't have a clue as to how to introduce ourselves.
We had just seen a report on Ikimoris in Japan;
Ikikomori means "cloistered" in Japanese - “those who refuse society.”
Apparently, the plural in Japanese is Ikimori,
and we added the "Hello" to the beginning, to say we were still a little “open”.
We have two completely different paths. I come from the publishing world,
with training in graphic arts.
I studied typography, but in a very traditional way.
For me, it's an applied arts school, art center;
I have the same basics as Nathalie, but not in motion design.
So we started structuring our team with developers, motion designers...
We love the diversity of our team: we have a Greek, a Canadian, a Swede ...
amazing and varied backgrounds.
We like doing things together;
We’re crazy for burgers - we try to find the BEST burger in Paris;
And we try to eat a burger once a week.
We're console gaming fanatics.
Sometimes for an hour or two, then we catch a bit of a lecture.
We often work on luxury brands, but also entertainment clients like Orange Cinema Série/
That's allowed us to work on shows like True Blood,
Games Of Thrones, and others.
We have a wide-open creative license. We watch the shows,
and brainstorm ideas ... this is how we made the game for The Walking Dead.
We try to make interactive experiences.
We are storytellers.
We're very fortunate to have this creative freedom.
Our inspiration comes a lot from the shows, videos,
designs, product designs ... and various resources.
Matthew Barney of Cremaster
was a huge thing for us. We found the project
to be super intense, super creative, completely unbounded, coming out of nowhere.
He's the only one who creates things
we feel are like us.
I'm passionate about horror movies.
Peter Jackson is my hero.
Hell Raiser and Brain Dead,
are wells of inspiration for me.
We always work in a conventional manner,
that is to say we draw, we write, we mix tools,
be it digital or photographic materials. We story board everything, the drawings...
and we combine it all.
We don't have set process,
but after the creative brief, we often begin with a
reflection period. As we all have diverse backgrounds and experiences,
everyone has input and ideas
and their own perspective. We then formalize it
using images, sketches, or photos.
For the TEN Project by Fotolia, we chose the theme: "Drinks",
which seemed to us to be the quirkiest,
allowing us more freedom for the execution.
We focused mainly on the subject of overdosing,
which we represented through a multiplicity of elements and overlays.
We wanted to parallel the theme with a simple
gesture, which can lead to overdose,
on a background frame of absinthe, evoking Rimbaud's eternal and delirious poetry.
I generated a body with Poser,
which I integrated with Cinema 4D.
Once the body is modelled and we had the 3D renderings
on a transparent background,
they can be worked on in Photoshop,
where we then make the cutouts, assemble the body, add the renderings using different tools.
We envisioned a periodic table of drinks,
so we drew it in Illustrator,
then modelled it in 3D,
which we blasted it by adding various explosions in Photoshop.
There was quite a bit of work done on the face also:
here, we used some Fotolia images of liquified broken bottles, fluids...
we worked a lot on the dripping on the character's body and face.
Then "Apple+L", "Apple+U" to change colorimetrics, intensity, and these kind of things.
We also added some flare elements;
not flares from Photoshop - but from After Effects,
where we've used them on transparent backgrounds embedded in our composition
as dynamic vector objects.
To finalize our creation, we apply a global noise filter
to homogenize the whole work.
We have some nice things coming up this year:
we're going to have an HKI party
in a fairly nice place, where we'll show for the very first time
our live VJing tool.
We're going to Chile for the Sudala festival,
which is similar to the Off Festival, with over 5,000 attendees.
My closing comment: "HKI for glory, create with pride".