Brother
Grey London & Brother International Europe
Present
The Printer Orchestra
The Times They Are a-Changin’
The times have changed.
The old world of printing just doesn’t cut it anymore. It’s time for its swan song.
Introducing Print 3.0: Brother’s new range of state-of-the-art, next generation printers.
To celebrate this, Grey London has created The Printer Orchestra.
A full-scale orchestra made entirely out of old, battered, reengineered machines.
Printers. Scanners. Copiers. Fax machines. Hard drives. Modems. Even huge dot-matrix printers.
97 dated, dusty machines.
Whirring, Clunking, grinding, buzzing. A harmonious cacophony of sound.
All hardwired and programmed to perform an Orchestral version of Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are a-Changin’ .
In Figures:
97 machines used in the final Orchestra.
Countless hours in production. Round the clock for a month to reengineer the machines into MIDI instruments before the shoot.
Innumerable breakdowns.
Thousands of metres of cable used for the entire shoot.
4 people – the core technology team; plus
4 assistants for the build; plus
2 people prepping the shoot;
And a 25-person crew on the day.
Chris Cairns, Director: “Hacking so many devices robustly in such a short period of time was a challenge but you can sleep when you're dead, which is particularly relevant if you die of sleep-deprivation. What did we learn? Don't hot glue microswitches onto stuff unless you love really horrible noises.”
Nick Rowland, Creative Director, Grey London: “Take a hundred old office machines. Turn them into musical instruments with the liberal use of a soldering iron. Get them to play a classic Bob Dylan tune. Sounds simple? Yeah, right. But what better way to usher in the new generation of Brother printers than with a distinctly 21st century homage to the machines and music of the past.”
Antony Peart, European Marketing & Communications Manager, Brother Europe: “Without the need for words or commentary, we simply wanted to combine image and sound to reflect that times are changing for Brother and printing in general . The Printer Orchestra draws a significant line-in-the-sand and highlights the dramatic evolution of our printer technology.”
Credits
Client: Brother Europe / Antony Peart, European Marketing Communications Manager
Brief: To create an innovative piece of online content to support the launch of Brother’s new MFC inkjet printer range
Creative agency: Grey London
Executive Creative Director: Nils Leonard
Creative Director: Nick Rowland
Copywriter: Lee Trott/Sam Haynes
Art Director: Sam Haynes/Lee Trott
Business Director: Eve Bulley
Account Director: Sophie Fredheim
Planner: Matt Buttrick
Production company: Partizan
Director: Chris Cairns
Clever Chaps: is this good?
Editor: Trim – Ross Hallard
Post-production: Time Based Arts
Soundtrack composer: Will Cohen
Audio post-production: Will Cohen
