Dry The River

The brief

Kickstart an online following for Dry The River by introducing them to an audience of creatives, artists and crafty makers.

Background info

• Dry The River had just released their debut single “No Rest”.
• They had a lot of buzz from radio and wanted to build a following online in advance of their next EP.
• The label had a small amount of budget earmarked for fly posting. We promised to use it more effectively if they gave it to us.

The solution

Dry The River’s sleeve designer had been using an image of a different animal for each record, intending to combine them all in the eventual album art. French creative Xavier Barrade was working with us at the time, and we introduced him to the band. They really liked some of the papercraft work he’d done. We thought it would be interesting to make a 3D poster of one of the animals, and we set Xavier the extra challenge of making it huge.

1

Craft and build

The paper horse structures were designed by Xavier in 3D using Sketch Up, before being printed out in their component parts and hand–assembled. Each horse structure took around 35 hours to complete. You can see a time–lapse sequence of Xavier building one in this short film we made to document the project.

2

Print and mount

The flat, poster component was beautifully screen printed at B0 size on thick card by Bob Eight Pop. The horse sculpture was then tabbed into this to create a sturdy, mountable poster (no horse puns intended).

3

Post and share

We created 5 posters in total, and mounted them in sites around East London. We photographed and filmed the process, and shared the results with press and blogs across the design and art world.

The results

Creative Review, AdWeek, It’s Nice That and Creativity all picked up the story, and things took off from there with coverage across hundreds of design blogs.

The film got over 130,000 YouTube views and the band’s official video for No Rest shot up from 10,000 views to over 250,000 views as a result of the publicity caused by the campaign.

The project has since been immortalised in several design books including Gestalten’s “Taken By Surprise” and “High Touch”.

Credits

Client

Dry The River / RCA

Agency

FOAM

Creative Directors

Phil Clandillon & Steve Milbourne

Producer

Simon Poon Tip

Creative / Designer

Xavier Barrade

Director

Rik Stanton @ Bark Films

Screen Printing

Bob Eight Pop