Hookie Tardigrade: Nasa Concept Motorcycle with J. Konrad Schmidt

The Tardigrade is the world’s first moon concept motorcycle.

Inspired by future and past adventures to orbit, original CGI by Andrey Fabishevsky, built by Hookie, photographed by J. Konrad  Schmidt, retouching and post-production CGI elements by Recom Stuttgart.

The Inspiration

Andrey Fabishevsky dreamed up the original idea for a creative sketch challenge with a friend on Instagram, and developed it into a CGI concept. The idea took social media by storm, with features and speculation about the possibilities.
“I’d seen some very stylised and cool concept sketches of NASA motorcycles, and I wanted to make a bike in CGI that felt like a fully functional concept, not just a cool stylised idea.”
– Andrey Fabishevsky

Bringing the dream to life

Among those who saw the idea and loved it was Nico Mueller of Hookie  –  a Dresden based design company working on custom motorbikes, components and accessories. Inspired by Andrey’s visual, they contacted him with the idea of making the bike for real. The project was named “Tardigrade” after the tough little organisms that have been known to survive even in space. Andrey made new CGI drawings, exploring the construction in more detail in preparation for the build.

“Together with Hookie, we made something really cool and fresh. I haven’t seen the motorcycle in real life yet…I hope this will happen soon!”
– Andrey Fabishevsky

The Construction

At Hookie, the process of the build began – intricate welding, careful machining and many late nights brought the Tardigrade into reality.

“A thought experiment that also raises questions about our future: What would life beyond planetary boundaries look like? What demands does outer space make on a bike that can travel in the darkness of space and largely from the shackles of gravity over icy lunar dust? And how far away are we from such scenarios?”
–  Nico Müller, Hookie

 

Read more about the construction on their dedicated site here: Hookie Tardigrade.
For even more details on the build, there’s an in-depth article in BikeExif here.
With the long and detailed build and development complete, they now needed the imagery that would convey the idea and fire the imagination.

The Shoot

The search was on for a location that could stand in for the moon, and friends of Hookie knew the perfect space – a porcelain clay mine in the Czech Republic.

The bike travelled by trailer from Dresden and was lovingly assembled ready to be captured in action for the first time. The fine pale dust of the clay worked brilliantly for both the texture for the bike’s trails, and the lighting and structure of the lunar surface.

” It was surreal. Andrew and Hookie did such an amazing job. Standing on this location with this bike felt like – What else could anyone wish for. It looked right from the first second on.”
– J. Konrad Schmidt

Post Production

Back in Stuttgart, Recom worked with Konrad to achieve an otherworldly atmosphere, referencing real life lunar photography in  the contrast and grading.  Some details were tidied up, such as removing the bike’s  stand and remaking  the wheels in CGI in order to have a realistic feeling of speed.

To break out of every day life, it is always cool to jump into space travel, to create an outer space lunar feel for such  a beautifully designed – out  of this world! – object as the TARDIGRADE. Recom is ready for the moon.”
– Thorsten Jasper Weese, Recom Stuttgart

 

Reception

The bike has been featured widely already  with features  in Designboom, Stirworld, Uncrate,and many more.

Future trajectory

With the world premiere as a part of the ADV:Overland exhibition at Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles in late 2021, Hookie wants to prove that even fantastic ideas can mature into a real, tangible object. All it takes is a vision and curiosity about the unknown.
Keep in contact with the continuing story of the Tardigrade on Hookie’s dedicated site here.

Selection of Images

A selection from the project. See the full series on recomfarmhouse.com here, on recom.de here, or on Behance here.

 

See the full series on recomfarmhouse.com here, on or on Behance here.

Credits
Client: Hookie.co
Photographer: J. Konrad Schmidt
Assistant & Location photos: Jeneba Komma
Original CGI concept: Andrey Fabishevsky
Model: Karolína Machová
Video: David Ohl

Post-Production Credits:
CGI Direction: Thorsten Jasper Weese / Recom Stuttgart
Post Production: Thomas Saalfrank / Recom Stuttgart
CGI Artist: Ronja Wafzig, Thomas Neumeier / Recom Stuttgart

 

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Grow Up Campaign for Mercedes Benz with Alice Moitié – In Situ

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Grow Up” is the most extensive content creation in Mercedes-Benz’s history.  Produced by Antoni, it’s a groundbreaking campaign centred around five short films. With young stars like rapper A$AP Rocky, the films tell a story that completely revolutionises the image of Mercedes-Benz, with the car becoming a natural ally for millennials in their journey to adulthood.

“Our competition isn’t ads, they’re real films, real TV shows. Stealing four minutes from the time people would be watching their favourite show on Netflix is a tall order, so we tried to be honest with ourselves with what people might actually be interested in.”  – Veit Moller, Creative Director (LBB editorial interview) 

For the accompanying stills, we worked closely with CD Veit Moeller and young photographer Alice Moitié  – printing and re-scanning, adding grain to create a strongly analogue film look, with CGI elements helping with the practical aspects of a worldwide campaign.

The campaign’s media locations are as bold and eyecatching as the rest of the execution, with colossal end-of-wall murals featuring single shots montages from the campaign, and big bold statement cubes in high traffic areas.

 

 

 

 

The shots were also a big success across digital media, showcased on the innovative website and shared widely on social networks.

Ipad Mercedes

The campaign has drawn wide praise for its radical approach

“Mercedes-Benz’s Most Ambitious Marketing Project Yet Is All About What It Means to Grow Up Tackling the evolution of luxury … and, well, life” – Adweek (Ad of the Day) 

“Mercedes-Benz’s Biggest Content Campaign to Date May Make You Think Really Deeply About Your Life”- Ad Age (Editor’s Pick – Creativity) 

“It’s hard to make a good car ad these days. Audiences are bored of the slick fare they are usually offered, and yet most clients still really, really want that shot of the beautiful new vehicle driving around the cliff edge. In this new set of films, those scenic shots are there …nestled in among a set of stories that are intriguing, and at times a little darn bleak….These new films make a welcome addition to the car-ad-as-short-film genre and sure beat the average shiny car spot.” – Creative Review

Also featured by Hypebeast, Campaign and High Snobiety.

Client: Mercedes Benz
Agency: Antoni
Creative Director: Veit Moeller
Photographer: Alice Moitié
Post Artists: Jonas Braukmann, Thomas Saalfrank, Julia Ackermann, Daniel Mattes, June Lee, Stephanie O’Connor / Recom Farmhouse
Art Buyers: Emanuel Mugrauer, Valerie Opitz, Marjorie Jorrot
Production: Iconoclast Germany

See our selection of the campaign images on recomfarmhouse.com

Mercedes - Grow Up wit hAlice Moitié

J Konrad Schmidt: AV-Defekt

AV - Defekt Exhibition

In this compelling and haunting self-portrait, J. Konrad Schmidt strips away all concealment of a medical condition he has had from childhood, and uses it to make a powerfuly revealing piece of art, inviting the viewer quite literally into his head.

Go behind the scenes with us for the background, technical details, process, creative stages, close-up crops, installation and artist statement of this extraordinary project.

Project background

J. Konrad Schmidt is widely acclaimed for his sensuous female portraits, and especially for his work with unusual analogue formats and materials, such as ambrotypes.

He approached us about a collaboration for an upcoming exhibition for the BFF – a well known network of high class photographers, based mainly in Germany. The exhibition’s theme was ‘Reduction’.

Using his concepts of beauty and analogue processes, he wanted to interpret this theme of ‘Reduction’ in a wholly unexpected and very personal direction, questioning these ideas of elegance and perfection by the use of his own facial structure in the work.

“The picture reduces me to my illness… created from parts of my x-rays, which were made in the deep sleep of anaesthesia.”

Since he was born, he has had a medical condition that haunted him, a vascular disease that affects his left ear and cheek, in which the blood vessels grow uncontrollably.

It has an effect on his public persona – in most portraits for interviews, or videos, you’ll notice he sits with his right ear to the camera.

This full face portrait was made specifically for this project.

J Konrad Schmidt portrait

Because of his disease, he has to go to the hospital at regular intervals. Since there’s only one hospital in Germany that performs these treatments, the place and the doctors have become a part of his life. He is always under full anaesthetic for the procedure, and the entire process is recorded with X-rays.

Using these X-rays, he wanted to rebuild his face for this project.

“I am contradictory to my disability. Now I am the error in the system. The devil’s civilian. Resilient, eloquent and radical with itself.

Before the fall of the Berlin wall, my worried mother took me from doctor to doctor in Eastern Germany. After the Unification, across the united republic. At the age of 10, I began an endless tour through cold operating rooms at the Klinikum Benjamin Franklin in Berlin-Steglitz.
This is why I am showing this work under this title now in this city.
Together with Recom Berlin, I used digital image manipulation for a truer purpose – to create a striking image, not to strike an image by manipulating it.”


The process

• Mood Boards

We collaborated together on moodboards to begin work on the overall feel of the piece.

Moodboards

•Technical details

Getting hold of the images was a tricky process. The X-rays were in a medical format, JiveX, embedded into a .exe file, burned on a CD.

It’s intended only for the use of doctors, so the controls are designed for their needs. Dragging the mouse up and down and right to left gives you basic contrast and brightness functions. Despite (or perhaps because of) this unadorned functionality, the output and interface has its own aesthetic interest.

Output 3c

The only exportable file format is a PDF. So that’s what we did. Each of those thirty-three PDFs had between four and forty-four pages.

So often, there’s something new to discover in every project : – )

“You can’t open more than 400 documents in Photoshop. I didn’t know that, and it’s the first time I’ve ever seen this message.” Jonas Braukmann, Recom Berlin

400 documents warning

This video shows all pages from all pdfs exported into PSDs via a script, giving us four hundred and four images to work with.

[vimeo 202090115 w=640 h=320]

Cycling through all the exported files, this video shows clearly the progress of the injected X-ray viewing agent is injected, as it spreads into all the vessels that have grown out of control.

[vimeo 202090885 w=640 h=400]


• Stages in creation of the image

We talked a lot on the phone, about the moodboards and what we had in mind, and this was the first draft, to see if the idea could work.
Version 1:

AV-Defekt version 1

We were both immediately very happy with the first draft, but wanted to try further explorations of the idea. We decided to enhance his characteristics…the hairline, strong eyebrows and his ear and cheek.

Version 2:

AV-Defekt version 2

We also tried a more dimensional version, incorporating more of the portrait.
Version 3:

AV-Defekt version 3

Konrad liked the initial draft best, and was thinking about what what should come next, showing it to friends and family. Meanwhile, we made  made a rawer version, by stripping away all the hair details.

Version 4:

AV-Defekt version 4

We ended up using the very first version – sometimes things just fall into place straight way.

The first version already told the story, and showed what we wanted to show.
Everything in this version is made from the X-rays, stratified and superimposed to create Konrad’s face, emerging from these medical records.  Only the light in his pupils is from a photograph.


Final image

AV-Defekt version 5 - final

Close-up crops.

We included some lines and technical artefacts from the original X-ray files, to preserve a reference to their origin – a contrast to the soft and convoluted organic forms with their precision and linearity.

AV-Defekt crop 1

The probing intrusion of the injection shows clearly, too – this is what enables the doctors to see inside Konrad’s head.

AV-Defekt crop 2

Detail of the pupil highlight, the only part which isn’t shaped from the X-rays

AV-Defekt crop 3

 


Installation:

We scoured Ebay for a lightbox of the right size and appearance, to keep the reference to X-ray transparency display – a feeling of faintly institutional immediacy, as if you yourself were looking at them held up in a doctor’s surgery. The doctors who provided the material for the project found it fascinating to see.
The final presentation was at the Reduction exhibition in Berlin, part of European Month of Photography.

J Konrad Schmidt, Reduction Exhibition
J Konrad Schmidt, Reduction Exhibition
AV - Defekt Exhibition

Artist Statement

These, like all the quotes here, are extracts from a translation of the text which is  printed and displayed beside the transparency. The full text in German is available on J Konrad Schmidt’s site here.

“Reducing people to their disease – no matter what kind – is discrimination. …With me, people dare to say:

“I have to ask you something?”
“No, you do not! Because I know the question already! ”
– And then: Totally surprised faces …
If total strangers would simply say nothing, it would help a lot. Then I would not have to speak out here. So you beloved anonymous Philanthropists out there – this is for you”

Credits: Retouching: Jonas Braukmann, Recom Berlin
Photography and Art Direction: J Konrad Schmidt
Exhibition photographs: Matthias Krüger

Volume of Light by Thomas Brown

Volume of Light is an innovative and interactive project, created in the studio by our friend and regular collaborator Thomas Brown. Beginning as a small series, it extended in scope to become a four year mission.

In an intriguing new approach to the way art is marketed, an online campaign encouraged people to adopt one of 469 images. We adopted image № G_150204_0097 – Just been thinking.

Recom's image

As an adopter, you receive the book which is a directory of all the images. The book comes with a print of your adopted image, which is a limited edition of one, just for you. Each image is also shared on Instagram and Twitter with its newly bestowed name.

The project culminated with exhibitions in London and New York, and the recently published book.

It’s a beautiful object, with iridescent cover and rainbow foiled type – the video shows the lovely textures and colours.

Thomas explains:

“The assigned titles will forever be linked to the image.  Volume of Light wants to know what you see, how you see it and begin to understand why certain choices are made. It is an exploration and investigation of semiotics, the phenomenon of Pareidolia and authorship….Each image represents the record of an action, a passage of time and a movement of light…In their abstraction they represent no thing but leave space to become everything.”

 

“I can’t say VoL offers a new way of experiencing art…people are visually assessing the world every second of the day, but maybe for some people it causes them to think a little bit more about what they were looking at, or to reflect on their experience of looking. It certainly offered an interesting way to interact at the exhibitions.”

Volume of Light Exhibition

With all the images on display as small postcards the viewers were encouraged to take them from the wall to get a closer look and move through the space, breaking the conventional gallery environment.

You can adopt an image of your own at https://volumeoflight.com and see more of Thomas’ work at http://thomasbrown.info

Work In Context

Some snapshots of our work in context :

MARC TRAUTMANN – VW GOLF ALLTRACK

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Few pages taken from the VW Golf Alltrack brochure, Germany, November 2014
Post-production and CGI Recom Farmhouse. See the making-of here.

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RALPH MECKE

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Ralph Mecke, Vogue USA, November 2014

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MARK WAGNER FOR AT&T

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Newark Airport, New Jersey, US, November 2014

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MERCEDES AMG mbH, Affalterbach

Our FULL-CGI visual from the “AMG Calendar 2014” is being used for the official ANIMAGO print campaign…

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RALPH MECKE

Client: Bloomberg Photographer: Ralph Mecke Post Artist: Thomas Saalfrank

Ralph Mecke, Bloomberg Magazine, Germany, 2014

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NISSAN PULSAR

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Nissan Pulsar, Lion, France, 2014

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Nissan Pulsar, Photography: Rick Guest, CGI and Post Production: Recom Farmhouse

See our making-of here.

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ABSOLUTE VODKA

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Absolute Vodka, London, 2014.

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LINCOLN

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Lincoln, Beijing, 2014.

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MERCEDES BENZ

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Mercedes Benz, Spiegel Magazine, Germany, 2014

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HYUNDAI SONATA

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Hyundai, New York, 2014

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FORD KA

Ford Ka Billboard retouching Recom Farmhouse

Ford Ka, London, 2014.

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MERCEDES BENZ – NEW SPRINTER

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We’ve been to the Mediterranean Sea over the 1st of May and visited the wonderful town of Rovinj. On our way back to the hotel, in the middle of nowhere, i saw that ad. I had to pull over and take some snapshots.

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Mercedes Benz, New Sprinter, Croatia, 2014.

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NISSAN QASHQAI

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Nissan Glass City out in Hamburg, see the series here http://bit.ly/1gwenHW

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Jürgen Klopp

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Jürgen Klopp Artwork by Recom (Agency: Heimat Berlin

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MERCEDES BENZ – F1

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Mercedes Benz, Stuttgart, Germany, 2014

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NISSAN QASHQAI

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Nissan Qashqai, London 2014

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TOYOTA …is everywhere!

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Time Out, London, May 2014

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Toyota, Brussels, Belgium, 2014

85 meters wide image on Toyota’s head office building in Brussels!

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FORD

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Ford, Team Detroit Advertising Agency, USA

Hundreds of insertions and over 90 different headlines for the Ford advertising campaign shot by Nick Meek. Here on dispay on the wall of Team Detroit head ofiice.

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THOMAS BROWN for THE TELEGRAPH MAGAZINE, LUXURY SUPPLEMENT

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The Telegraph Magazine, LUXURY SUPPLEMENT, Spring 2014

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ELIZAVETA PORODINA for QVEST MAGAZINE

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QVEST Magazine, Germany, April 2014

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MERCEDES – BENZ

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Mercedez Benz, Germany, April 2014

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VW BEETLE

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Germany, January 2013

In the grey beginning of 2013 these sunny positive VW Beetle Campaign images were all over Germany.
I liked the contrast.

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Valkswagen Beetle Advertising Campaign

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NISSAN

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Rochester, Kent, UK, October 2013

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Stoke Newington, London, UK, October 2013

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Nissan Advertising Campaign, October 2013

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SMIRNOFF

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Smirnoff, Seven Sister Underground Station, London, UK

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Smirnoff, Dalston, London, UK

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Smirnoff Advertising Campaign, September 2013

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TOYOTA AURIS CAMPAIGN

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Toyota Auris,  Shoredicth round-about, London, UK

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Toyota Auris Advertising Campaign, 2013