The Shark in the Park. A strange discovery.

And we’re not talking about what we found after breaking through the bathroom wall into the neighboring apartment. The discoveries in our newly extended “West Wing’’ were the highest ceilings ever found in a Berlin Altbau, plus the most regal ping pong room of our dreams. Sweaty times followed, full of sweat and even more sweat, accompanied by a full spectrum of human emotion, focusing on the finer nuances of different types of anger and shame. Window panes fell under the wrath of flying ping pong paddles, former lunch buddies vowed to not speak to one another indefinitely. At least until lunch time.

The year 2015: The Shark in the Park

The discovery we’re actually talking about being made that year was truly remarkable, even to this day. A previously unknown, carnivorous plant. It wasn’t us that discovered this new species. It was the KSPRI, a Korean scientific research group. They in return commissioned us to visualize their latest findings in the field of ‘Parco Pristis’, a mesmerizing life form. For us at Woodblock this was quite a special request. How the KSPRI found us is still unanswered. But we always loved jumping out of the commercial context, offering our services in cross disciplinary fashion so we were all in.

Although it was a great honor to work on this scientific project, the process of visualizing the life cycle of ‘Parco Pristis’ was a tough one.

Scientists are quite the data sticklers, not usually famous for their imagination, so there wasn’t a lot of wiggle room to be a hot shot creative. Good thing though that the provided data already read like a bloody B-movie horror script à la ‘Attack of the Killer Tomatoes’. At first we had a hard time believing that this was accurate and confirmed information.

Creatively we didn’t have much to add, we basically recited the ballad of mother nature’s brutal truth and after a bunch of tough feedback rounds, where they pointed out all the little creative liberties we took (sigh), everybody was -hopefully- happy with the result. At least we were.

Shout out to KSPRI. Hope you guys are doing well. No hard feelings.

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