Around 1999/2000 I collaborated with Johnny Hardstaff on an animated promotional video for SONY as part of the launch of the Playstation 2 console. We had already worked together on a promo for a ‘The Freestylers’ single which shared exactly the same format and content.
Johnnie’s ideas were sharp and his sketchbooks were a wonder, but he could only just turn his Mac on, so me and my gifted cohort Chellie Carroll did all the grunt work while paranoid Johnny art directed the project from an iron-gated bunker in Brixton. No really. None of us knew video software so the five minute film was made using Photoshop and Illustrator with nearly 7,500 individual multi-layered frames sequentially numbered and compiled. In between producing adrenalin magazine I spent months cutting out single frames of Eddy from Tekken 1 and break dancers I had filmed, then outlining and adding them as layers to the frames. I had a Giles Peterson compilation I’d got from adrenalin’s office that had the Minnie Ripperton track on it, so you can thank me for the soundtrack too.
And Johnny fucking Hardstaff didn’t even credit Chellie and me for our work, he even chopped the credits off the end of this video so he could take all the glory, the twat.