Dry The River

The brief

Launch Dry The River’s debut album Shallow Bed in a memorable and special way, appealing to the band’s fans across the worlds of creativity, arts and crafts.

Background info

• We had already created our 3D papercraft posters campaign which had helped establish an online following for the band.
• The band and label wanted to do something special in the same vein in order to launch their debut album.
• By now the band had a strong following of hardcore fans on Twitter and they were keen to involve them in the launch.

The solution

We came up with the idea of posters you could listen to, and decided to create a poster for each track on the album. In Shallow Bed’s sleeve art, each track on the record was represented by an illustration of an animal.

1

Design & build

We needed a way to keep the posters feeling craft led, but at the same time we wanted to embed an electronic music player and some kind of speaker or earphone. FOAM creatives Sophie Yeoman and Keighley Allen came up with the idea of using a tin can on a string to act as a low tech earphone. Sophie remembered that her grandfather had created artworks from nails and string, and she used the technique to great effect to create the animals and cleverly hide the headphone wiring in the string.

We used a layer of MDF under the poster’s backing sheet to provide a backing board for the nails.

The tin cans were handed painted with the details of each song.

2

Adding music

We used an Arduino Uno with the Wave Shield add–on to create a music player with low power consumption, and hid one in a watertight box at the back of each poster.

3

The launch

On launch day we headed out to the streets of London with the band, who tweeted the location of each poster as we put them up. We had a great reaction from press and fans alike, and the story spread around the world via art, design and music blogs.

The results

The project picked up mainstream tech coverage from Cnet and creative coverage from Creative Review & It’s Nice That, leading to a lot of organic blog coverage. Arduino also featured the project, connecting the band with a huge audience of Makers worldwide.

Credits

Client

Dry The River / RCA

Agency

FOAM

Creative Directors

Phil Clandillon & Steve Milbourne

Producer

Sophie Yeoman

Creatives

Sophie Yeoman & Keighley Allen

Director

Greg Taylor

Screen Printing

Bob Eight Pop