RES Features: RES 10

H5

Words: Sandy Hunter

Photo: Edouard Paturel

H5, the genius directing team founded by Ludovic Houplain and Antoine Bardou-Jacquet in 1995 after graduating from Paris' Penninghen graphic arts institute, skips among disparate styles with imagination and unerring precision, crafting some of the most innovative music videos of the last five years. "We don't want to be stuck into a category, like animators or graphic designers-turned-music- video-creators," explains Hervé de Crécy, who joined H5 in 1999 just prior to Bardou-Jacquet's departure and the release of the group's first music video, Alex Gopher's "The Child," which features a kinetic trip through the streets of New York City -- composed entirely of words. "We started animating because it was the easiest way to come to video, with our savoir-faire."

H5's stellar projects include a video for Playgroup's "Number One," featuring not only a dancer with preternatural skills, but a CG homage to a range of dance icons -- from Prince and James Brown to Jamiroquai and Travolta -- as well as a video for the Super Furry Animals featuring a colorful infrared jaunt through New York City nightlife. But whether they're using animation, CG or graphic design, the team invariably deviates from the familiar. "When we use animation, we try to use it in a radically different way than how it's normally used," says de Crécy. "For instance, in the last video we made for Alex Gopher ["Use Me"], we wanted to create images very different than what CG can do nowadays. We didn't want to use all the possibilities of the machines, like textures and lighting everywhere. We just wanted to do something basic and graphic, like the Disney movie Tron."

Both "Use Me" and "Remind Me" (for Röyksopp) share a statistical take on society, portraying contemporary capitalist structures with ironic wit. The Röyksopp video, which earned the 2002 MTV Europe Award for Best Video (and was the audience favorite in the RESFEST 2002 By Design program), brings together information graphics, diagrams, curves and statistics to make a statement on a greedy world seen through the eyes of a hapless marketing manager. "As graphic designers we appreciate the way statistics can describe the whole world," comments de Crécy. "It's funny and frightening how the smallest aspect of the way we live can be translated into numbers. It also shows how predetermined our lives can seem from this point of view."