Tripp called and basically asked if I could run with some skyscrapers and shapes in a “30th century neo tokyo meets F-zero” kinda format. Of course, I was instantly on board.

I sketched up a whole bunch of futuristic towers during which Tripp added the additional instruction to aim for “pretentiously thin and tall.” And that was all it took to catch the vibe. Tripp and Jenna envisioned a specific environment and just asked for additional elements as needed.

From a little over 50 pencil sketches of various geometric abstraction and sci-fi affinity, we selected the strongest items for me to ink, scan, and vector.

It was important to get bold, crisp lines in the inking stage in order to get a strong definitive scan. I then fiddled around with Illustrator’s Live Trace settings to recreate the scanned illustrations as vectors.

Now, Jenna could copy and paste an infinite number of each tower, colorize them separately, resize them, reverse them, distort them to kingdom come. An enormous city could now be built from transformed versions of each building.

Meanwhile, Tripp replicated several of the geometric illustrations in order to design intense patterns and tunnels for the camera (and motorcycle) to race through.  I am still catching subtle uses of these drawings every time I watch the video. For example, see if you can recognize the skid marks from the motorcycles tires as it tears through the track from one of the illustrations.

Always a thrill to be a part of another astoundingly deep world devised by the genius directors behind WATTS.

EDIT: Here’s the vimeo version aka way better HD.

Metro Station: “Every Time I Touch You (E.T.I.T.Y)” Official Music Video from WATTS on Vimeo.