Hi-Res!

Interview with Florian Schmitt

- Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your role within the company?

F: My name is Florian Schmitt, I am the creative director and co-founder of Hi-Res. The company has been going for about 8 years, my wife and I had moved to London from Germany, (my background is in product design and film) and originally, we came here to make music. Somehow, along the way, I got sidetracked and started experimenting with the Web, collaborating with my wife, whose background is more graphic design. This experimentation led us to do more commercial projects under the title of Hi-Res.

- You also helped to create another company called Nanika. What are the differences between Hi-Res and Nanika with regards to their concepts?

F: Nanika is a company that I co-founded with Andreas Muller in 2005. Andreas had always been interested in ways of interacting with machines, beyond just the use of a mouse and a keyboard. He went from Flash, to Director, to Visual Basic to C+. It was always more research and development but it eventually evolved to be its own company; Nanika, which means “Something” in Japanese. This happens to be my favourite Japanese word.

In terms of the work we do Hi-Res is much more Web focused and Brand focused and is more narratively driven whereas Nanika’s experience is more physical and kinetic and something that is location specific. It involves more body and physical movement as opposed to just clicking and pointing at a screen.

- Aesthetically, how would you describe Hi-Res?

F: Originally, we all thought that Hi-Res didn’t have a house style and that was really important for us too because we didn’t want the work to look like a Hi-Res project. It was all about the feeling that it was a Hi-res project instead. I think if you look at the range of work we have done over the years, the styles have really been different. We have worked on projects that are really cute and fun as well as handling some really dark projects too.

So I think it’s really hard to pin us as one type of aesthetic; it reflects on the amount of different people we have working together, each with their own take on a project.

- What projects have you worked on and what do you have currently in production?

F: In the beginning, we started with small projects for artists on the Ninja Tune record label. We did Amon Tobin’s website and DJ Food’s website also. The music industry showed more interest in our internet work and one of the first bigger artists sites we made was for Finlay Quaye. Since then, we have continued to make a lot of artist websites, more recently we made one for Massive Attack and are currently making the new Goldfrapp website.

On the other side, we started to get into online promotion for films. This was great for us as we all had a passion for films and the films we were asked to work on, we were really passionate about. The first one was “Requiem For A Dream”; one of my all-time favourite films. It allowed us to take the narrative from the film, extend it online and play around with non-linear and creative narrative.

Since then, we began to do much more commercial projects with the likes of Sony, Sony Playstation, Diesel and Nokia. So A very wide range but one thing they all share in common is an inherent narrative that we are extremely keen on portraying.

- You recently did a project in Omotesando Hills in Japan, can you tell us a little bit about it?

F: It was initiated by a company called Projector who created an interactive wall for the Beyes shop (a Sony Concept shop) in Omotesando Hills. They asked us to provide content for a large wall which had a camera at the top. We wanted to create an interactive wall that had a wallpaper pattern that could react to movement in a subtle way. People in the store were able to move and watch the patterns they had created which was a really beautiful sight. This is one of the things that we try to achieve with Nanika is that we want people to interact and lose themselves inside technology and not even realize that they are doing it.

- You have just released a new book called “Amantes Sunt Amentes” (Lovers Are Lunatics). What made you decide on this title and can you describe some of the content of the book?

F: We are quite passionate about our work here and sometimes it doesn’t even feel like work anymore. We have made mistakes over the years, but you learn from them and eventually they are made right. For example, in 2001, we decided not to do film websites anymore as we were listed in People magazine’s Top 50 Important People and even though that was amazing to be known as the “Film website guys”, it made us feel that we should try and follow other creative outlets instead. A move that was financially foolish, but allowed us to get other creative projects off the back of the new recognition.

So there has been that element of lunacy in our work and the lover element you could say comes from the basis that my wife and I are lovers and founders of the company!

The content of the book went through different phases of trying to follow a rough timeline of a mix of both chronological and contextual projects. So the book shows a progression of our work from 1999 up to the present day. It’s really great to have all your work bundled into one place and we see it as a memento for ourselves and for the reader which showcases many of the projects we have worked on.

- Do you have any favourite projects among them?

F: That’s a question that always comes up and to be honest, all of them are my favourites. The first two projects in the book, SoulBath and Requiem For A Dream were probably the most pivotal. SoulBath was our first foray into Flash animation and we really had no experience at the time in this field and Requiem For A Dream allowed us to work with Darren Aronoflsky and try out non-linear narrative.

Hi-Res! : http://www.hi-res.net/

Nanika : http://www.nanikawa.com/

Written by Selph