The Guardian published a cool feature on Warren Fu, who has most recently directed videos for Mark Ronson and The Ting Tings, and it includes a couple paragraphs about how Fu became a rising star in creating music videos and The Strokes’ art director.
If you don’t know Fu by name, you certainly know his work. He designed this t-shirt, the 11th Dimension logo, the new Strokes logo as well. His videos can be found at the bottom of this post.
My favorite thing about the story, before we get to the excerpt, is how Fu became involved in working for George Lucas’ production company and linked with The Strokes. It was, as you can read here, pretty much blind luck.
An avid music fan, he heard the Strokes’ You Only Live Once and “a picture of a graphic equaliser came into my head”. Taking the title of the song to heart perhaps, he cobbled together a 30-second clip of his vision and, with zero previous connection to the Strokes, emailed it to their manager. A message from Casablancas’s wife came back, asking Fu (ever the polymath) to design the Strokes’ website. He then met Casablancas himself “and we hit it off. He watched the clip and I got a phone call at 3am saying, ‘We have to make this.’”The rest is digitally recorded history. Fu’s video for You Only Live Once – all spaceships, neon graphics and those 80s sci-fi references – introduced his “retro-futuristic” style.
You can follow Fu on Twitter right . This is his breathtaking video for YOLO…
The Strokes – You Only Live Once (Warren Fu Alt. Version)
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