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Back in February I received and email from David Rondel Cambou, a good friend of mine who runs the Paris-based design agency Hellohikimori, telling me HKI were working on a project for Diesel. David and his team were assembling a list of artists and designers they were hoping to commission and asked if I could participate.

The project turned out to be an online art installation as part of the advertising campaign for Diesel’s new fragrance Only The Brave.
The concept consisted of virtual rooms where the invited designers interpreted the concept behind the fragrance — “Do you have what it takes?” — that is key to the product and the campaign. After working out a schedule I committed to the 2nd wave of the site, to be launched in June.

One thing that attracted me to the project was that we (the invited designers) were given complete artistic freedom. While we were free to incorporate campaign visuals I decided to stay clear of them feeling that using the brand imagery would be too easy — and given the artistic carte-blanche I saw this as an excuse to use Diesel as a platform to show off my work. Of course Diesel uses my work as a platform to speak to its (no doubt painfully hip) consumer base so I guess we’re somewhat even.

When I started on the project I had recently finished work on the Omega Code poster, and found myself wanting to explore that type of “space noise” graphics (for lack of a better description) further, and felt there could be an interesting contrast between the slick fragrance campaign and abstract, glitchy visuals. It was important however to avoid the all too common trap of designing for design’s sake and create images without meaning.

While doing image research (yes, looking at NASA imagery) I realized that the epitome of “having what it takes/are you brave enough” is being an astronaut: being shot in space strapped on top of a rocket into a vacuum, only wearing a space suit, knowing that even the smallest slip-up can be fatal. I felt that using the theme of space exploration as an interpretation of the fragrance concept was really interesting (and a bit left field), and it gave me the opportunity to continue exploring the “space noise” graphics without it being superficial.

Now that I had a fully realized idea, I focussed my attention on vintage NASA audio/video footage of Apollo missions, initially looking for interesting radio crackle and more generic soundscapes to create a nondescript audio track for my room. In the meantime I drafted in my brother Tim to collaborate on the project. I felt his abstract 3D images would fit perfectly with what I had in mind, so we started to run through some tests to find the right tone of image:

Early image tests

Important, to me at least, was to capture the lo-fi graininess of vintage video and the sense of wonder when seeing strange alien vistas from space — so typical of old NASA footage. It wasn’t until I ended up at Apollo 15 footage that everything clicked into place, when I heard the the quote of Astronaut David R. Scott, Commander of the Apollo 15 Lunar Mission:

“As I stand out here in the wonders of the unknown at Hadley, I sort of realize there is a fundamental truth to our nature. Man must explore.

And this is exploration at its greatest!”

That quote, (luckily not as well known as the famous Neil Armstrong line) synthesized perfectly what I was trying to articulate.

Check out this video on the Apollo 15 mission, scrub to 5.20 in to hear Scott utter his famous words:

After having found a proper audio transcript of the mission that I could edit it was pretty much plain sailing: Tim created a series of abstract space images which I edited together in after effects, adding HUD graphics (which, incidentally, are taken from Apollo mission checklist documents), glitches and the audio to create a 35 second video loop for our room on the Diesel site which we apply named Man Must Explore:

Check out the full room on the Only The Brave site, and you can check out hi-res image stills on Flickr.