Tokyoplastic | Drew Cope & Sam Lanyon Jones
www.tokyoplastic.com


Can you share with our viewers the history behind Tokyoplastic:
Tokyoplastic is a website, it was released in 2003 and did quite well. It won some awards and lots of people wondered, "How did they do that?"

Where are you from?
Drew Cope was built in a factory by Japanese women wearing only underpants. Sam Lanyon Jones was born in Salisbury. They now work from an underground laboratory at a top-secret location in the heart of England.

Design Education:
Sam studied photography for a long time.
Drew studied product design for a long time.

Your work is outstanding! What inspires you to create?
You see something that makes you go "SHIT I wish I'd done that!" but you didn't, so you go and do your own thing.

At what point did you realize you could actually make a living out of doing what you do?
A little while after the release of the first tokyoplastic; it was getting 40,000 hits a day, which was very surprising and cool and made us happy and we received a lot of enquiries from potential clients. Prior commitments meant that it took a whole year just to get to the position where we were able to start accepting the offers.

I personally love Flash, however a lot of designers seem to have left the idea of having a full flash interface and turned back to static pages. What are your thoughts on Macromedia Flash and how has it benefited your website?
While flawed and sometimes buggy it's always been a fantastic piece of software. It unites so many disciplines in an incredibly fluid and transparent interface. Flash is for us the final stop, first we do all the work and then we bring it together in Flash, kind of like an After Effects for the Internet.

What was your most difficult project and why?
Working for a very big client we had been commissioned to produce twelve 30-second animations in as many days. The approval process was insane and everything we did would go through 5 different levels of vetting, was sent several times round the world and would take a week. You would start with an idea for a simple narrative and by the time it got back to you it was completely unintelligible, we found that most of our animations were reduced to 30-second product shots before we had produced them.

That kind of creative impediment is hard to work through. Our producers on that project did a really good job though, they were in the same situation and I think found the whole thing equally frustrating. Ultimately it was an incredible learning experience.

What advice can you give someone who is trying his or her hand at Flash design?
Not to get to caught up in Flash. It's such a great container that some people don't put anything in it. That's bad. And to surf a lot. There is an amazing wealth of great design out there and it's an endless source of inspiration for us.

Your gallery is filled with bloody 3-D models I love it! What's the story behind all that blood?
There were some robots lying around and there were also some splatter textures. It's fantastic when things come together like that but most of the time it doesn't. and you just end up sitting there.

Your "Drum Machine" piece is entertaining as hell! Was that all created using Actionscript or is there more behind it?
Lots of people mailed us with this question or something very like it. Sorry we didn't write back. Most of what you see has been modeled and animated externally then imported. We use Actionscript very infrequently.

What do you all do besides Graphic Art and Motion Media? Basically, what other interest do you have?
The normal stuff and the scuba diving.

How would you describe something that's over-designed?
Probably as ugly, but its not half as common as stuff that's been under-designed. Also ugly.

What are your thoughts on Design Community sites such as DIK, Australian Infront and now Pacdesco?
I think they are excellent and without them we wouldn't be so successful. They provide an invaluable service and are an incredible resource for great design inspiration.

I find it quite easy to let my view become a little blinkered if I just stick to one site and there seems to be a tendency for sites to interlink too much. It is always refreshing when you break out of that and discover a whole new community that you never knew existed. I far prefer to be presented with one or two links a week that are of real quality than a bunch of mediocre ones every day. Oh Christ it's not another photographers portfolio, and it's all the same.

What is your all-time favorite movie and why?
Don't have one. Have favorites within genres and day-by-day they change. Like music or literature or any other art form, there is such a gigantic quantity of it and so much of it is exceptional for such wildly different reasons

Can you give us a preview of how the design of the new site will be?
This site is slightly different from the first one, technically it's a lot more advanced, and it's bigger. We see it being quite organic and over time it will evolve from the main menu system in strange and slightly random ways. Get back to us in April and we'll show you some previews ;)

Do you have any future projects you would like to share with our community?
Yeah, there's something that we are doing at the moment. It's a little like the drummachine but a lot more advanced, it's all about musical hybrids, two distinct styles of music and characters battling for audio supremacy. Hopefully it will have a lot more characters and animation, but only if we can pull it off ;) It would be great to start exhibiting other people's work and collaborating with other artists / musicians / animators, its something we have been meaning to do for some time. You heard us.

Also we are working with www.flying-cat.com but that's a big secret so keep it under your hat.

What would you like those reading this know most about your team and your company?
Thanks loads for your support, sorry we don't get round to answering all your mails J don't let it discourage you. I hope this interview has answered some of your questions.

Thank you for doing this interview and taking part of our project. Any last comments you would like to add?
Yeah, I would like to say a big THANKS to all our employees who tolerate our strict dress code with perennial good humor. They have been amazingly supportive.

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