I had the privilege of working on the long-running iPod “silhouettes” campaign back in 2007. The brief for the project came directly from Steve Jobs who wanted to do a “rock” song. From there, our in-house music supervisor curated a playlist of up-and-coming songs and we collectively landed on “Flathead” by The Fratellis.

I was tasked with exploring a visual style to match the song. Since the band was from London, it made sense to draw upon the fashion trends of The Fratelli’s fanbase, who were largely urban youth known for wearing vintage clothes from second-hand stores.

After exploring some options in the form of photo collage “mood boards,” we narrowed our choices and enlisted the help of visual effects company, Logan. Their designers evolved the visual style into a brightly-colored, 1980’s-inspired theme, paired with punk revival silhouette fashion.

In addition to the 1980’s-inspired “hero” version, I explored an alternate version that utilized overlapping silhouettes, which had never been tried before. The idea was inspired by the opening titles from the classic film, Dr. No. The finished spot version was titled, “Party.” See below.