Alien Holograms created by Woodblock for Tom Kaulitz’ music project Wedding Cake perform with Snoop Dogg and Heidi Klum For Germany’s Next Top Model Final
WHAT A HEADLINE! It almost feels like it randomly popped out of a buzzword headline creator. But it really was as much fun as the headline suggests…
We were a bit skeptical at first because in our experience, those kinds of projects come with a big package, rigid expectations and too many voices. But it was just too tempting to not try and engage — we’re musical aliens ourselves and then touching base on a video call with Tom & Devon for the first time made us feel we were thinking alike. To confirm that, we challenged them to bring them on board with how we would translate their baseline briefing into visuals. So we aligned the team with a mood board and then went into scribbling first moody designs that already gave a hint into storytelling. And I think everyone was pretty confident we were a match very soon.
What can I say — we laughed a lot and sometimes we had a hard time stopping to just mess around with ideas but concentrate on going step by step.
I think the way that whole process of collaborating worked out should really serve as a blueprint for all commercial production — I’m 100% convinced that the more trust towards the artists the better the result will always be. It’s insane that many times in commercial production there’s tons of pressure created by going through endless stupid iterations, trying to force artists to do more hours. It’s just an anxious try to create security by trying all possible options rather than doing one right.
In no way do we enforce or expect our crew working overtime or weekends at Woodblock, but in this case we had to make sure artists get some rest because they just never WANTED to stop but keep going because they were so happy creating the stuff they really wanted to create.
Learning that Tom & Devon had been talking about this project for years now confirmed that virtual characters have been quite a hot topic even before the pandemic and all the metaverse buzz started and we’re uber pumped this opportunity came up at a perfect time. High end character design and serious storytelling in a virtual / real time production environment- we’re totally game and I think creativity and the amount of work we will be able to get out there is just going to explode further going down this path. There are just so many things that can be explored and stories to be told… the future is now.
I guess the perception of Tom’s band Tokio Hotel has always been pretty mixed, but I’ll admit I’m a sucker for guilty pleasure and I think one can only admire what Tom and the team have achieved. Where they are today is the result of hard work and brilliant minds and I’d say the fact that everyone at the studio has been walking around humming “Chai Tea with Heidi” for the past couple of weeks confirms that someone involved has that super skill of getting to ALL people.
When we uploaded our masters for the show I really didn’t know how to thank the team for their effort but promising them we’ll do our very best to be able working on more stuff like this. So hopefully this is just the beginning — not only but especially for Wedding Cake.
