Tokyoplastic

The story of Tokyoplastic almost feels like a subplot out of a William Gibson novel. Two creative friends starting to collaborate, Sam Lanyon Jones with a background in photography and Adrew Cope from industrial design and video games. The duo had found a common platform in tools like Adobe Flash and started to show their wares on the Internet. Excelling in doing what they loved, also mastering other digital tools like 3Dstudio Max, After Effects and SoundForge, their talent became rapidly recognised and their work sought after by some of the major advertising agencies, MTV and film festivals.

The two multmedia artists initially operated from their homes in the UK, evolving their very own style and methods, inspired by having grown up with cartoons and a strong influence from contemporary Japanese visual culture that they combined with a good sense of humour. Their canvas of choice is the web, but their work have been remediated by the big-ads companies into video promotions and short films (which, of course, is reabsorbed by the Internet).

Their style and and their characters have a digital freshness, but in the tight collaboration between Sam and Andrew you see a live demonstration of what some call Photoshop Layer Tennis, with turn-taking and multiple layers of creativity and critique and a continuous quest for what may happen next providing a narrative drive. Historically, this form of tight and playful collaboration can actually be found already in the “cadavre exquis” technique invented by surrealists in the 1920s.

Their first claim to fame is probably The Drum Machine, a Flash animation with a soundtrack from Ed Cookson of Sancho Plan. With an extremely economical less-is-more set of Japanese looking figures in a strict red, white, black colour scheme, each figure represents the playing of each respective sound that builds up into a complex polyrhythm. They have since developed many more figures and many other characters that exist both in advertisements, short films and as limited edition physical toys for adults (desktop decoration for trendy geeks). They have also produced limited edition prints.
Tokyoplastic is a creative duo to watch, as the built-in cultural tension, from being in the UK while making things that look Asian for a worldwide audience, holds plenty of room for excitement.