Vect is the artist we’ve found to entertain and inform you in this interview sunday. For the ones who want more details Vect is Émile Sacré, from Toulouse, France, a talented art director and musician. an interesting an particular artist as you’re going to read in this article.
Enjoy.

WPD: First thing we have to say is that we noticed that you are at the same time the art director and the producer of the song “Rhodes Trip”. Since this is not a common thing, we’d like to ask if the process behind the realization of the video was thought after, before or at the same time of the song production, to fully understand what happended and how you’ve worked.
 
Émile Sacré: I created the music first because this track is a part of my Altitudes LP. For this LP I had to design the whole visual identity with mostly illustration. In order to create a global universe I then decided afterwards to realise this short animation for “Rhodes Trip”. The video has thus been adapted to the music. I wanted to create this atmosphere psychedelic and atmospheric (like the music) by animating my illustrations and giving more material and grain to the graphics.
 
WPD:Your website has a strong visual link to the video, do you plan to keep this identity for future videos or is this a unique and temporary identity for promoting “Rhodes Trip”?
 
Émile Sacré: I think I can adapt this universes to my future projects, I think that this universe corresponds well to my type of sound. The shapes and the tones can evolve. And with this kind of depiction I don’t have to use a precise narration, I can navigate with aesthetic and visual things. I think that the visual identity of the website will also evolve regard to my music.
 
WPD: Let’s get deeply into the analysis of this, starting with the visuals. We thought that the animation was brilliant, do you want to talk about how did you developed the story and why did you choose this minimalist but powerful style?
 
Émile Sacré: These are simple animations with a game on the shades and the materials. The characters or the architectures are only excuses to hypnotize the spectator and make him enter into my musical production. I used several organisations of stairs in order to propose my interpretation of the work Altitudes, name of my LP. The characters live in the space while shaking their head on the beat. We are in a contemplation of the scene which aims to be surrealist. The minimalist aspect also allowed me not to tell too many things, to let the spectator focus on the light moves and the slow animations. Still in a hypnotizing and psychedelic link.
 
WPD: The colors palette (red, green and tones of gray and lightblue) is probably the characteristic that gets fixed in your mind after watching the video. Why had these colors been chosen?
 
Émile Sacré: I absolutely wanted to use halftones, faded colours to be in agreement with the hot and crackling tone of the sound. I couldn’t use too loud colours to go with the music, it would have been a stylistic nonsense. Moreover, with non-natural colours, it is possible to play with the opacity and to create beautiful transitions softly.
 
WPD:The use of texture gives to the visual a vibrant and lively look at the animation, such as the use of floating lettering. Did you created the type and texture yourself?
 
Émile Sacré: For the typography, yes. All the letters have been drawn by hand on Illustrator, and then animated on After Effects (like all the editing by the way). However, the textures have been found a little everywhere on the Internet, and then animated in the style of a .gif very quickly. This is what created indeed this vibrant and crackling aspect.
 
WPD:  A detail that can’t be missed is the characters playing with the hula hoops, which mixed to the flashing use of colors of the background creates an hypnotic and psychedelic feeling to those bits of the video.
Is there a metaphor underneed the hula hoops?
 
Émile Sacré: The hula-hoop can refer to the loop, which is a recurrent element in my musical productions. It is not a metaphor, but a visual catcher to accentuate the “sampling” and repetitive side of my music. I also absolutely wanted to animate vocally my characters, to synchronise their expression with the slow voice of Mos Def.
 
WPD: Jumping onto the tech and spec stuff, did you do the animation digitally? Which software did you use?
 
Émile Sacré: This clip is a mixing of “image by image” animations and computer assisted animations. I prepared my illustrations (characters, architectures, stairs…) on Illustrator with a graphic tablet, then I imported everything in After Effects to animate layers, textures, characters, effects. The advantage to work with computers in this special case is to be able to test different representations quite quickly and to animate some details, impossible or hard to animate manually. For example on the clip I realized for Souleance, La belle vie, some lines have been transformed into particles to create space, dimension.
 
WPD:At last, we’d like to know: are you planning to release new videos for other “Altitutes” singles?
 
Émile Sacré: Not for the moment. I am at the moment working on the realization of new clips, for other musicians this time. However for this Altitudes project, I am intending to release a limited number of vinyls. The music is for me a second activity, it comes after my professional projects. That’s why I can’t dedicate all my time to the realisation of personal projects, but I can’t do without them? It is not impossible that one day, I ask someone else to realise a clip for me, in the style of remixes. I like the idea to propose a re-interpretation to another illustrator or video maker.
 
(translation thanks to Emilie Larpin)