Joseph Melhuish

0:00 Hey guys, yeah, I'm Joe. Hello. Yeah, I'm an illustrator and animation director based here in London. I've been doing what I do freelance now probably for about five years, coming up to six. Mostly what I make is a mix of editorial illustrations, TV commercials, campaign visuals for advertising, music videos, record covers, things like that. Yeah, and I've had the chance to work with lots of great people like Spotify, Boiler Room, Apple, The New York Times, MTV, I'll Swim. Rather than just describing my work for ages, I've made a little video to sort of bombard you with it, like really intensely, so I'll let that play for a minute and then we can get on with things.

1:16 Yeah. So, yeah, that's me in a nutshell. So, what I've been known for making more recently actually has been club posters. I make animated ones for social media and then also these physical ones as well. I'm actually just going to talk a bit about how I got into doing that and a bit about my process, which is sort of unique for 3D. So, this is me at work in my messy room. I make all my stuff now in VR and I've been doing that for about a year and a half. So, what you see is on the left and what I see is on the right.

2:34 Before that, I was using sort of more traditional 3D methods like box modeling, which is what most people are familiar with seeing where you see all the polygons and you extrude cubes and things like that. And there's a few reasons for me changing over. One of them really is that my first love for creating work is sketching and I studied illustration at Kingston many years ago. I keep lots of sketchbooks and for me that's the most organic way of creating work. And this is something I made before I started using VR.

3:08 Aesthetically, it doesn't look that different, but they took a lot longer to make and it was a very slow, unspontaneous process. And what that meant was I couldn't really iterate a lot of ideas quickly. I sort of had to plan and then make it and I couldn't really accept smaller budget jobs, which often are the most fun ones because it would take so long to make them. So, when I discovered I could start making 3D models like this, just like how you would make a sketch in a sketchbook. It was kind of a revelation for me. So, I started pumping out illustrations, playing with it, playing with the medium.

3:49 But I didn't necessarily have a project or a goal at this point, so I thought it would be nice to have some sort of reason to keep creating work and in a world that I wanted to be involved in. So, just after COVID, as clubs were reopening, I had this idea of starting a mix series where I could invite DJs and musicians who I liked to contribute mixes and then I would create works to go along with them. And the idea was basically to just make good connections with people whose work I enjoyed and also have a regular output and an obligation to keep making new works.

4:29 So, I was having a lot of fun exploring mark making with the VR tools and exploring textures. So, these were some of the things I was making for those mixes in the series. And part way through doing that series, I also started a radio show where I was DJing and I was still having guests on that and I would continue to make these illustrations for the radio show as well. And I was having a lot of fun just messing around and I was making them very quickly, usually in under a day.

5:01 This is what it looks like when you import the 3D model from the VR sculpting app into cinema so you can see it's just like a normal 3D model when you finally have it. So, whilst I was making them, I got tagged in this tweet by this DJ from London TSVI and someone who he knew was looking to get a designer in to re-band their club night in Belfast.

5:28 And this was my first big club poster commission thing. And he was just an amazing guy to work with because he basically asked nothing of me other than to do whatever I wanted. So, I just sent him this, was the new logo and he said, yep, that's good, there was no sketches or anything.

5:46 And then I sent him this poster for the first night and he was getting great bookings.

5:53 This was for Overmono and I just sent him that and that was it. It was done, there was no back and forth or difficulty. And it was so much fun to make these and I always had a fun time trying to integrate the text into the poster or come up with a surprising animation for it. And yeah, these were super fast to make, it's not something I would have been able to do before. Yeah, and it was just a chance for me to be creative with these new tools that I had been learning.

6:25 This is that dog rigged up, it's absolutely terrifying, but one of my favourite ones I made. And this was one I did of a bug that was inspired by a real bug I saw in Mexico.

6:40 So yeah, those were really popular and kind of got my name out quite a bit. And I started getting other commissions from within the music world.

6:51 So this one on the left was for an event at Boiler Room with the fashion designer Tara Heikin. And on the right there's an evil spectral steed with the DJ and tarot reader Manuka Honey on it for her tour. That was one of the most complicated things I've ever modelled in VR.

7:13 It was extremely detailed and the hardest thing about it was I had to capture her likeness, which I think I'm okay at doing in sketches, but in a 3D model sculpting like that I found it very challenging. But you can see here like you can surround yourself in reference images in there, just as like a fine artist might put like little stick things with tape on the wall around their painting. You can do the same thing here and it can be very intense when you're surrounded by giant women.

7:39 So this was another club night I rebranded. Again, dream guy to work with, this guy Yonti who runs a night in Tel Aviv called Gazoz.

7:54 I want you to do whatever you want, just send me something. And he said some buzz words at me like trippy, like acid and like crazy or whatever. And I sent him this and he was like yeah that's great, so that was really easy as well. And these were some sketches I did. Often with these now I'll do sketches for myself so I don't spend so much time just faffing around in VR, like not knowing what I'm doing.

8:21 But yeah, he as well was super happy with these. I was a bit worried about at first because these went all over Tel Aviv. I was like is it going to be fine to have this image with this guy with all these flowers stuffed up his ass.

8:34 But yeah, Yonti was like if you think it's a good idea then I do. So that was a really fun one to do actually. I can't work out if I'm going fast or slow through this. So this is what I've been doing most recently.

8:51 So these guys Bone Soda, I don't know how they describe themselves, but I guess they're like a collective of DJs. They have a show on NTS Radio which is like a local radio station. And they do Club Nights as well.

9:06 So they had been asking me to do some for about the last year.

9:11 So these were two that I'd done for them previously. So one for Joy Orbison there and this other one for Stay On Site. Those were really fun to do. The guys were fun to work with. And again with these ones I really enjoy doing all the typographic elements myself. And there's some from the other posters in here as well. I've never been like trained in graphic design so I don't really know any fonts. I just use Helvetica for everything.

9:41 So I kind of just find it easier to make my own one rather than be confused about what's a good font or not on font websites.

9:51 So yeah, after those ones they were like, okay, we're doing this big takeover of the Club Fonox in Brixton. And we're basically doing four events and then we need a poster in addition to those four posters that's going to sort of summarize the whole line up and we're going to use that also for promotion.

10:11 So I started drafting up ideas for them and I had sort of two routes I wanted to do. One where every poster was going to be some sort of extreme sports motorbike thing and another where there would be some demons and the lineups would be in the veins or written on the demons' bodies or something.

10:28 But they were pretty keen for everything to feel as different as possible.

10:31 So we ended up just sort of mixing all the ideas together. These were the first two I made.

10:39 So yeah, again this was really fun. Just trying to get the lineups onto the image rather than as part of the typography just hovering over the top. Obviously it makes it really complicated when there are line up changes and almost every act through this entire event dropped out due to random things.

10:57 So it's actually a total nightmare to do these but we got there at the end. Yeah, I just wanted to say as well, with VR modeling it's really easy to make organic shapes. It's not so easy to make hard surface modeling which is what you call when it's a non-organic object, like a piece of metal or something.

11:21 So this was a really complicated thing to make that I didn't expect. I thought I would be saving time by having two motorbikes on one poster and another but actually it just took forever. But yeah, there's the remaining two.

11:35 So there's another demon there and there's the girl on the motorbike. So for the final poster I had seen this painting in a gallery in Mexico and I just loved the composition of it.

11:48 So I took a picture of it and I thought, I don't know what I'm going to use this for but I'm going to use it for something. There's all this negative space in the middle and then there's all this room to put typography but it creates a whole image. You could do something with it.

12:01 So I decided to sort of change it slightly so I could get the line up in there.

12:09 So this was my sketch basically was to have a sort of human character with the line up for the event tattooed on the character's tongue.

12:19 So this is the line up, how I did it. I do a lot of my sketching on my iPad so I drew this on the iPad.

12:27 This is classic one of those things where you spend like four hours trying to make something look like you spent ten minutes on it.

12:34 And then I modeled up the head and you'll see in this video that basically I only model the parts you're going to look at with the camera. Everything else is just a gargled mess of stuff but that's just how you got to do it.

12:52 And then yeah, this is how it ended up and this is definitely being one of the more popular things I've done. It's had a really good reception. I kind of wanted to just sort of end on saying that for me the biggest change in my style and my career is being trying to find the way of working that I find most enjoyable and easiest.

13:20 And like I think when you look at work and people can see that you had a fun time making it, that really resonates a lot more strongly than if you labor over something because you want a particular aesthetic. It's actually better to chase what you find fun, I suppose. And that's something I've learned in the last sort of year or so. But yeah, thanks very much. Cheers.