Club Graphics- Devo

As I was making club graphics for Planet Earth a camp member asked me to make an animation based on Devo and set it to their song "beautiful world". It was a challenging request because its easy enough to create an animation based on a specific theme, but creating one based on a band is a different story. It's easy to abstractly represent "the 80's" or happiness or sadness, but how do you represent a band abstractly?

I didn't know anything about them outside the "Whip It" music video so I watched a documentary on them. Turns out that they're a band inspired by a single concept: De-evolution. (Devo... De-evolve, get it?) I always thought they were a joke band, but it turns out they were a very serious, angry, socially conscious band raging about overpopulation, consumption and the dumbing down of the "MTV generation". They also had a thing for "spuds". They were basically the most punk new wave band ever.

I decided to theme my animation around obsolete technology. The challenge though was to represent the obsolete technology and also represent the 80s, Devo AND the rotating earth theme.

Ok, that one is easy, but what else?

I started with the basic concept of a slide projector to transition between shots. I'd recently seen phenakistoscope discs and thought they'd be perfect for the animation. I found some that seemed to fi the theme of de-evolving,  split each of the segments of the discs into their own parts, rotated them at 24 frames per second and sepia-toned them.

I found a great disc of an ancient map of the earth, but it wasn't quite enough earth, so I added a proper rotating earth based on the old universal logo.

Finally, I added some neon trails and particle effects to emphasize the 80's concept. Admitted, its a lot of concepts crammed into a single video. Did it work? I dunno. You decide.