Ya love them for their distinctive hand-screenprinted show posters, but Paul Hammond and Seth Smith, the brains, talents and good looks behind Yo Rodeo, aren’t one-trick ponies, although their poster for Two Hours Traffic’s Polaris Prize nomination makes you scream for more. There were Christmas and Valentine’s Day cards, album-cover art commissions and an exhibition of their prints at the gallery P572 in Quebec City. Yo Rodeo also had one of the biggest draws at last year’s Nocturne arts festival---nine hand-screen printed, anaglyphic (red/blue) 3D images of fantasy worlds. Even though the pair have their squeegees poised on all sorts of projects, Hammond says that there are definitely connecting themes: “Animals are something we tend to work into a lot of our work. Patterns and textures are pretty common for us too.” Next up: two new series of prints, one of which can be cut out and assembled into sculptures.
First runner up: Adam Hartling
Second runner up: Mike Holmes
Halifax Music Goes 3-D
Last year Halifax’s music scene went multi- dimensional. Yo Rodeo’s Three Dee Realms, a series of nine hand-screenprinted spiralling metropolises, had over 1,000 people wearing those blue and red cardboard glasses at Nocturne, the night-long art festival. Paul Hammond, one half of the arty pair along with Seth Smith, says they did a fair amount of research on anaglyphic images before printing. “We read books, and learned a lot about the process before we really got into it. But once we started we found trial and error to be the easiest way to get the best results,” says Hammond. “We actually wore the glasses most of the time that we were working on the images, which really messed our eyes up for a while. But it was worth it.”
Earlier in the year, The Superfantastics’ Choose Your Destination vinyl EP was released with 3D artwork (courtesy Mike True Stories Holmes) and glasses. Then The Superfantastics threw down with a 3D video for “Rites of Spring,” a cute song about spending a sunny day with your sweetie. The video was directed by Superfantastics drummer and videographer Stephanie d’Entremont, along with help from some friends and students from NSCC’s Film & Television program. The theme was spring, even though the weather was not, but d’Entremont and singer/guitarist Matt MacDonald braved the winter cold, dressed in spring clothes.
“I had no idea how to make a video 3D. At first I thought I would just shoot a video the regular way, then add an effect in post and that would be it,” d’Entremont says. “But it wasn’t that easy. I knew I needed two cameras that were exactly the same, and they needed to be two inches apart throughout the shoot. That way, when the two layers were brought into post, and you put the red and blue effects on the layers, your eyes would adjust once you had the glasses on, and the 3D effect would appear. I approached my college friend, Peter Bremner, who also shoots at CBC with me, to help out, so he builds the board to screw the cameras onto, and since both shots had to be similar, there couldn’t be any zooming done. With that in mind I came up with a very simple one-shot video that would have enough background and foreground to present the 3D effect. Peter shot the video out of the back of a moving van.”
Next up: a spanking new 3D video for Dog Day’s “You Won’t See Me on Sunday,” shot by Rick White, off their upcoming album Concentration, is now on YouTube. Time to invest in a pair of those glasses.
