Airside recently finished production on an NHS campaign to increase awareness and screening of Hepatits amongst prisoners of UK women’s prisons.

We worked with creative agency Sainted, who were using digital kiosks installed in prisons to get the message to an audience with restricted access to traditional media.

The kiosk’s interactive content features animation and live action footage –designed and produced by Airside –which needed to appeal to a tough crowd about issues such as sexual activity and drug consumption.

Therefore our designs had to be gritty, engaging and entertaining. So, as well as drawing lots of scratchy characters having sex, sharing needles and getting tattoos on their bums, we got to mess around with fake movie blood for those ikky live action scenes.

Airside was recently commissioned to design a t-shirt for Central London studio space, Mount Pleasant Studios. With a regular stream of film industry professionals flowing through their studios every day, Mount Pleasant Studios wanted to create a gift they could give to their clients as a thank you for using their space, which would also advertise their services. Reasoning that riggers, gaffers, cameramen and the rest of the crew working indoors under hot lights tend to wear short sleeves, they figured a t-shirt was a good idea.

But the t-shirt needed to be more than just a company logo. Mount Pleasant Studios wanted a design that crew members would love wearing no matter where they were, as well as having some reference to film production. Airside’s t-shirt achieved that with a double-sided design. The front shows a typical movie monster rampaging through the city of London, while the back reveals the reality behind film’s smoke and mirrors – the sets and the production crew who create movie magic in places like Mount Pleasant Studios.

Airside has contributed to Barclays’ latest ad campaign, which uses illustration to bring the bank’s products and services to life.  Barclays commissioned a series of illustrated tapestries – including one by our old comrade Dick Hogg – to tell the story of the bank’s products by illustrating their various aspects in one scene. Details from the overall tapestry could then be used to highlight specific features as required. Airside was asked to illustrate their range of insurance products.

The brief was perhaps one of the most high-brow we’ve ever received, referencing the Bayeux Tapestry, Bruegel’s painting Netherlandish Proverbs and the 1956 Paul Newman film, Someone Up There Likes Me. The idea was to narrate a fun series of accidents and near misses whose consequences are covered by the various insurances offered by Barclays, from home and buildings, to car, travel and life. Check out the full illustration below, or visit Barclays website to see detailed sections.

Airside recently teamed up with Japanese mobile phone company, KDDI, to produce an illustrated booklet called Rangers. The booklet is a free gift for Japanese purchasers of a new KDDI phone, which comes with novelty USB plug attachments.  KDDI asked Airside to tell a story featuring these attachments, which include birds that sit on the USB cord like a telephone wire and firemen (known as rangers in Japan) holding it like a hose.

Our story saw a fiery cat, threatened chicks and some groovy firemen give a new twist to the old story of a cat being rescued from a tree. Written by Airside and featuring gorgeous illustrations by our former intern, Erica Dorn, Rangers is told in a sequential comic book style with accompanying rhyming text in both English and Japanese. Well, at least it rhymes in English.  Anyone know if the translation does?

When The Guardian called to see if we were available for a job, there was initial disappointment amongst certain Airsiders, that it wasn’t to help James Richardson write puns for the Football Weekly podcast.  Still, doing some illustrations and an animation to promote their Better Relationships supplement was a fine consolation – though we’re still waiting for that call from AC Jimbo.

Better Relationships is a two-part guide to getting along with your friends and family that came free with The Guardian and The Observer on Valentine’s weekend. Airside created a number of promotional illustrations that appeared in the newspaper, along with a TV commercial that features the return of the chest bump.  All right!  Watch the TV ad here.

Airside designed the artwork below for the cover of the December issue of the renowned magazine The Architecture Review.

Given Alex’s background in architecture, this was a real thrill for us. Even if the hours spent looking at those colourful cubes did make our eyes go a bit funny.

Airside was recently approached by the Sunderland-based Northern Gallery of Contemporary Art (NGCA) to take part in an exhibition entitled Think-Tank: A Marketplace of Ideas. The exhibition – part of Design Event 09, the North East’s annual design festival – sees Britain’s leading think tanks collaborate with its top designers to imagine how we might create a better nation.

Being your typical yoghurt-knitting, Guardian-reading liberal lefties, we were only too happy to be paired with the left-wing think tank Demos. Until we saw the intensely detailed statistical study on power in 21st century Britain that they wanted us to explain in a two-minute animation.

Demos had just completed a nationwide survey, the results of which were used to rate every single constituency in Britain according to a number of different social and economic aspects. Each of these aspects has an effect on the power held by individual people in each area, and by the constituencies as a whole. For Demos, this survey helped explain theoretical concepts about power as well as showing its practical implementation in 21st century Britain.

For Airside it was an epic spreadsheet of numbers with far too many digits after the decimal point (see below). They patiently explained to us what all these numbers meant. We politely nodded our heads and scratched our chins. Eventually the ideas began to sink in but as soon as we began to understand the various implications of the study, another problem arose. How could we possibly even begin to touch on these complex issues in a short animation to be displayed on a loop in an art gallery?

Obviously Demos weren’t expecting us to cover everything – they just wanted to get ordinary people thinking about the issues raised by their survey. Things like how unemployment makes individuals more dependent on state benefits, thereby reducing their political power, as they would always have to vote for the party who promised to safeguard these benefits. It follows that a region’s overall employment level affected its power and areas of high unemployment had less power and influence than those with plenty of jobs.

This was the kind of simplified explanation that helped us start to understand the study. And given that we are ordinary people, we figured this should work for everyone. We just needed a hook on which to hang our painted-by-numbers picture. The variety of different factors that could affect an individual’s power seemed to have parallels with card-based games like Top Trumps or fantasy role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons. This analogy was easily extended to the world of video games where characters often have energy bars that are lowered by damage or increased by “power-ups”.

Our first script was a straightforward explanation of the different factors, such as education, wealth and employment, measured by the Demos study. It featured two characters from different regions, whose power bars would increase or decrease according to the particular score of their area. The designers began work on character design, based on simple pictograms that, besides being a classic staple of information graphics, would signify the everyman nature of the data.

But it soon became obvious, that while this approach would fulfil its function of explaining the various aspects of the survey, it was also quite boring. A series of voice-over explanations with some accompanying pieces of animation would be more like a pretty lecture and seemed unlikely to get its intended audience thinking about the subject for themselves. Another problem was that the information didn’t have any context. It was all about the here-and-now, but surely power is a subject that has concerned humanity for its entire existence?

One of the design references that Demos has brought to our first meeting was a book called Rank: Picturing Social Order 1516-2009. This was a catalogue that had accompanied a previous exhibition at NGCA collecting over 100 works of illustration and art dealing with class and social order in Britain. It is a beautiful book filled with wonderful images – and if it hadn’t been their only copy, we definitely wouldn’t have given it back – but the one that really grabbed our attention was the front cover.

The book jacket reproduced a famous etching by the 17th century French artist Abraham Bosse (see below). It had originally been the frontispiece for Thomas Hobbes’ book, Leviathan, a profoundly famous and influential work about society and government. The main image features a king, holding symbols of power, emerging from a landscape. The king’s body and arms are made up of people. Below are other images that signify power such as castles, guns and churches. All of this got us thinking about the history of power and its development in Britain from the preserve of the few to the many. This was the context we needed.

We had now gone from worrying about how to explain the Demos study in two minutes of animation, to deciding to not only do that, but to include a brief history of power to boot. Our next script began with this brief and irreverent introduction before moving onto the computer game style power bar explanation of the study. Further discussions with Demos lead us to pare down the latter aspects into the two main concepts explained in the final film: Resilience and Agency.

From a design point of view, this first appeared like a drastic change. However the pictogram characters that we had developed proved very adaptable and soon they were being fitted with cavemen beards and bishop’s miters. Taking another cue from Bosse’s Leviathan cover we decided do away with the power bar and instead use symbols of power to visually represent the concepts of Resilience and Agency. So each historical figure holds corresponding instruments such as a sword and shield or a crucifix and bible, which transform into a mobile phone and briefcase when we reach the modern age.

With the script and design in place, we were finally able to explain some of the implications of Demos’ statistical survey to ordinary people and get them thinking about the contemporary nature of power. Now all we needed to do was make sure they watched it. The final animation needed to be engaging, interesting and amusing so as to attract the attention of a naturally wandering gallery audience. Fortunately, this is the fun bit.

However the production budget was very small and we were running out of time before the exhibition opened. So big thanks to our amazing animators Jimi Newport and Robert Milne whose underpaid, long hours of hard work added dollops of humour and intelligence to the final film. Thanks also to Suzanne Cave for her persuasive voice-over, Philip Pinsky for the perfect sound effects and Factory for putting all the sound together.

The Power Gap is currently showing at NGCA in Sunderland as part of their Think-Tank: A Marketplace of Ideas exhibition. The show runs until 23 Jan 2010.

Blood! Mwaah-ha-ha-ha-hah!

Halloween may be over for another year, but that hasn’t stopped Airside stocking up on a pint of blood.

But what – I hear you ask – do we need this for? Are we taking our True Blood watching parties a tad too seriously? Perhaps we need a blood transfusion in order to continue with our decade-long commitment to hedonism, a la Keith Richards? Or is a previously downtrodden and put-upon girl about to be crowned Airside Queen at this year’s Christmas party, and a couple of resentful losers want to drench her in blood as revenge?

Actually it’s none of the above. The fake blood is part of a live action shoot for a new information film we’re making for NHS Prison Services. The shoot takes place tomorrow, so we’ll have some more photos and information for you soon. In the meantime, if you spy any Airsiders frantically rubbing their hands and crying “Out, damn’d spot! Out, I say!”, try not to be alarmed.