Oh, to be a rock star just once! To spend the whole day doing whatever you want, to have row upon row of girls lying at your feet, and to have your life be just one big party – and, of course, to make a whole lot of cash and become exorbitantly rich in the process. But is it really all that to get all those millions into your bank account? Design students Florian Köhne and Hannes Hoepfner took a closer look at the situation and came to the conclusion that living the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle is not so easy at all. They found that you have to have a genuine hit to make the big money, and that most musicians have a hard time earning even enough to bring home the bacon and make ends meet.

Investigating the Rock’n’Roll Lifestyle

In their film “Bacon, Anyone?” the design students take the sale of a CD in a record store as their point of departure in investigating who really makes any money in the business when you look at the interplay between music vendors, the music industry and the artists themselves. The film also shows what the GEMA and GVL – Germany’s two music collecting societies – actually do, to whom they pay out money and in what amounts. The result is an informative and amusing film with impressive design elements and much ingenuity. The film came into being as part of work completed for a course at the design studio of the University of Applied Sciences, Potsdam. The work’s high level of quality is all the more impressive given the fact that the two students had very limited means at their disposal to create it and did not have the same tools that professionals have available to them. But, with their talent for improvising, Köhne and Hoepfner have succeeded wonderfully at making up for these disadvantages.

The film combines animated graphics and pie charts with animated silhouettes that illustrate the information in an eye-catching way. It also has a rock star who makes the public swoon with his guitar-playing, the hordes of female fans that go along with it and the record-company executives who stuff their own pockets. The animations are based on live footage taken in an improvised studio in a friend’s nightclub – complete with a Reflecmedia Chromatte as a blue screen and a pair of borrowed Arri studio lights. Friends and the filmmakers themselves served as models for the silhouettes.

Fitting Design with a Grunge Look

The film is designed to have a Grunge look derived from its rock-star theme. For example, its background contains a wall with battered plaster giving off the charm of a basement club, which alternates with a pair of stained jeans, a vinyl record in a badly tattered sleeve and tattooed flesh. The graphics and animations are presented against this backdrop. In a crafty move, the film focuses in on the label of the jeans as it explains how collaborating with a record label works. But the film also has a number of other extremely inventive elements at other points and combines graphic, text and backgrounds in particularly creative ways. For example, the buttons on the jeans are used as bullet points for a musician’s most important sources of revenue, and the round label on the LP is employed as a pie chart for the shares of the proceeds from an album’s sale going to retail stores, distributors, the record label and the musicians. Florian Köhne put together the graphics on his own iMac over weeks of painstaking work. The compositing and the animations were achieved using Adobe After Effects, and the live footage was put together using either After Effects or a combination of Photoshop and Illustrator on a Wacom Cintiq. For the rendering, the university made available a render farm set up on its own computers and allowed the filmmakers to play it out on them on the weekends, as well. Hannes Hoepfner composed and mixed the music himself. The two students were able to convince the actor Justin Beard, a friend of theirs, to serve as the narrative voice; Beard also helped them make the script sound more colloquial and authentic. The result is a professional infographic addressing an international audience that is both informative and entertaining – and without revealing that it was made on a shoestring budget. It’s quite an accomplishment and sure to be a genuine hit. In the end, there actually are other paths to achieving great things than following the rocky road to the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle.

About Florian Köhne and Hannes Hoepfner

Florian Köhne and Hannes Hoepfner are both 28-years-old design students at the University of Applied Sciences, Potsdam. “Bacon, Anyone?” emerged out of work they did for a motion graphics course taught by Professor Klaus Dufke. Motion graphics is also the focus of Hannes Hoepfner’s studies. Previous to making “Bacon, Anyone?” he had already worked for a handful of smaller production companies on 2-D animations, visual effects and main titles. Previously, Hannes Hoepfner had done more work with user interfaces and websites, and he had only limited experience with moving images.