A Hilarious and Fascinating Interview With Laith Bahrani

Laith Bahrani is author of the unbelievably popular Low Morale series, a talented and Hercules-esque freelancer, and all round alpha male. FreelanceSwitch had a chat with him about what it’s like to have Sony and MTV knocking at your door, and the perks and pitfalls of freelancing…

FreelanceSwitch: Hi Laith, thanks for joining us. How did Low Morale come about?
Laith: Before I quit the rat race and flung my liberated carcass into the abyss of madness that is freelance artistry I occupied a respectable job as Creative Director in a large multimedia agency in Reading, England. Despite the decent wage and comfort of an established job, 3 years of pandering to the dollar-driven depraved demands of degenerate sales teams and clueless clients had taken its toll on my soul.

Morale was at an all time low as me and my fellow designers despaired at the dissatisfaction of our daily drudgery. Then one dark dingy winter day in 2004 it happened. I was slumped at my desk as a sales person attempted to brief me about a project: I think they’d convinced a client to have the internet on DVD and I was required to produce a quote and time-scale. Having finished discussing work the sales person then attempted to engage me in social conversation. As if we were friends. The words spewed forth and devolved across the air into an incessant yapping sound.

My head drowned in depression and a desperate desire to escape this deluge of disingenuous drivel. Eventually it stopped and the sales person departed leaving blissful silence and a slight trail of slime that glinted grotesquely under the stripped school-style lighting overhead.

I slowly looked across the room over at my mate, Greg, whose eyes I could just see over the top of his 2 monitors. They were moon shaped with mischievous glee having just witnessed my ordeal.

I formed my hand into a gun shape, raised it to my head and mimed myself blowing my brains out. Greg got up and mimed throwing himself down the stairs. I replied with chucking myself out the window. He stuck his fingers in a plug socket. I put my head in the mini-fridge and slammed the door repeatedly.

5 minutes of death-pantomime later and I sat back down with the words “this would make a cool little animation”. I went back to my flat that night and made the first episode of ‘Low Morale’. The rest as they say is geography.

Incidentally in that response I was going for the record use of words starting with the letter ‘D’. I count 31 out of 353 words. I’ve no idea if that’s a record, it was an effort and I shall not be doing it again.

FreelanceSwitch: The Creep video clip you created exploded over the web – was that a surprise, or did you know it was a work of creative genius? Did Radiohead ever get in touch with you?
Laith: The Creep video was a very crazy, very amazing experience and the reaction was definitely a surprise. In all honesty when I was creating Creep I never really considered how it would be received. I was just immersed completely in my attempt to express and release how I felt at the time. In effect I had gone inside myself which is actually illegal in some countries.

When Creep was finished I emerged blinking like a new born mole into the sunlight and put the animation live. The reaction it got was so massive and so quick that it made my head spin. I think in the first week I watched the hits go from about 1000 on Monday to 17,000 by the following Friday. After a few weeks the Creep video got round to Radiohead’s merchandise and tickets company W.A.S.T.E. They got in touch and passed on feedback from Radiohead’s “management” who basically said the piece was fantastic. However I’ve no idea if Thom Yorke himself has ever cast his non-lazy eye over my work and sadly nothing much further really came from the Radiohead side. I know that the band made a concerted effort to distance themselves from the song ‘Creep’ to avoid the perils of being labeled a 1-hit wonder. I’m just grateful to everyone who emailed comments about it to me. The biggest buzz was feeling that people could relate and respond to something I’d created on an emotional level. Empathise meh.

FreelanceSwitch: The Creep video clip led to a commissioned video clip for Nizlopi – JCB song. The song then rocketed to number one on the British charts. Did you collaborate closely with the band on the project, or did they leave you to spin your magic?
Laith: Again another fantastic experience, made all the more fantasticified by the almost autonomous creative freedom I had on the JCB video. My ideal brief, the kind God would give if he were a client and worked at SonyMusic, having worked his way up from janitor to…God: “here’s a blank piece of paper and a piece of music, go do something pretty”. This was basically the situation with JCB. The band sent me the song and I listened 14 Mcbillion times and started doodling. The greatest level of collaboration probably came at the beginning when I’d established the main themes and ideas and wanted to get the bands feedback and thoughts. Generally they were ecstatic and in fact told me over the phone through tears of joy that if they ever reached Number 1 they’d buy me an island. The video was completed by May 2005 and the song was number 1 in the UK by Dec 2005. I’ve yet to receive a single grain of sand.

FreelanceSwitch: Tell us a little about your freelancing company, Monkeehub.
Laith: Monkeehub started out innocently enough as a name for my first portfolio site which I developed just after leaving University in 2001. It housed a raggedy collection of my first flash animations and some sketches and it featured a little monkee character that stood in the middle, pointing at stuff and shaking his ass at the user. Although it was crude and beared all the hallmarks of impetuous youth it was enough to help me get my first job as a web monkee doing flash bits and graphics for sites. Since then Monkeehub has gradually taken on greater significance and more substance and grown in its role as a representation of me and my work. Finally in February 2005 I felt that I, and by extension Monkeehub, was strong enough to go it alone. At that point Monkeehub became my brand, my creative identity, my wife and probably my eventual destruction. I still consider Monkeehub to be in its infancy (much like my social development). World domination is the ultimate ambition but it’s very important to me that Monkeehub grows naturally and at a pace I feel comfortable with.

FreelanceSwitch: Your work is very labour intensive. Do you still do everything yourself, or do you have an army of minions?
Laith: In general I do absolutely everything myself and the work load is crazy stupid. This interview alone has taken 3 months. Whilst minions would definitely help me the truth is part of working alone suits me; there’s a very solitary, introverted and intense side to the way I work and how I put myself into projects. Complete absorption at the expense of luxuries such as eating, socialising, seeing daylight and breathing is something I feel I have to go through if I really focus on a project. That said I do really want to hook up with more animators to help reach new ambitions that can’t be achieved alone. I’m not a complete creative loner either. There are a few very talented friends of mine who I try to get involved in brainstorming and concept stuff, and one of my best mates is an actual genius programmer who could probably make a wife in Flash if I asked him. Note to self: ask Dave to make me a wife. Further note: word it differently when you ask.

FreelanceSwitch: Low Morale episodes have recently been acquired by MTV. What’s it like having them knocking at your door?
Laith: At first it was a real buzz to hear from MTV. When I conceived Low Morale a fleeting ambition whizzed through my mind that it’d be great to see it on MTV, and my mates who first saw it said the same. So it’s was a realisation of a dream when they came calling with talk of mobile phone content and rainbows made from gold and sex. However my lawyer failed to point out a number of fairly crucial clauses in the contract. Now MTV have exclusive world-wide rights to use/show about 9 of the Low Morale episodes on TV for about the next year and they’ve also legally adopted any future children I have. What’s more frustrating really is the lack of time I have to develop Low Morale at the moment. There are a lot of new ideas I’d like to try with the characters and I’ve been trying to develop a script with my friend Greg for a TV pilot episode. He’s lazier than a stoned hippo though so it’s a slow process.

One thing I did find time for however was to hastily setup a gypo cafepress shop for Low Morale.

FreelanceSwitch: Panda Island seems to come from a totally different perspective on life from Low Morale. Is this reflective of a shift in your outlook on the world?
Laith: This one is a bit of a Pandora’s Box but given that you’re all miles away and the chance of me meeting any of you is rendered negligible by our geography and my reclusive nature, I feel I can be candid about this. Gather round and let’s all talk about love. Let’s talk about how when you first fall into that swirling vortex of nerves and hornyness you can get lifted higher than Keith Moon’s kite. And it’s an amazing feeling and you love everything and colours are more vibrant and the world is greener (or in London’s case less grey). That’s where I was when I conceived and drew Panda Island. Like Low Morale it was an attempt to express and give tangible form to an emotional state. The characters were derived from affectionate names and the island is a manifestation of a place removed from reality and other people. It’s a love vacation between 2 characters flown out on Virgin first class, let lose to frolic briefly on the island. But vacations don’t last forever, and the characters have since boarded separate budget Easy Jet planes and flown off in separate directions. And the Pandas plane crashed and he got horribly maimed and scarred and didn’t eat for about 4 weeks and a part of the seat stabbed him in the heart, but he was still alive, just writhing in constant agony waiting for sweet sweet death to end his torment…

FreelanceSwitch: What are the perks and pitfalls of being a cult hero?
Laith: Well I’d feel egotistical even acknowledging that fact I’m a cult hero (though I obviously have no trouble talking about myself), but I will say this: the feeling I get knowing that people who see my work are, for a few brief moments, in a place that I created engaging and focusing on a story and characters that I conjured in my messed up little head is one of the best feelings I know. It’s heroin for the ego.

Like all drugs it has its price though. Animation is a slow, painful, laborious, isolated, time-obliterating process. And at 5am, when you’ve been working since 1pm non-stop you’re sitting there waiting for the render to finish and suddenly you feel something happening with your right eye. A twitch. An involuntary twitch. And I figured out what that twitch is. It’s sanity trying to climb out your eye. I have to wear a pirate eye-patch when I go out now.

Pirate patches aside, one unexpected pitfall I’ve experienced over 2006 arises from the fact I’ve been treading (almost unknowingly) a very fine line between ‘artist’ and ‘commercial freelancer’. This means that the projects I have the most desire to work on are my own – pieces that revolve around and explore emotions and stories and characters that appeal to me. But I need the money and the time to do so. I have to balance that side of my desires with work that can support me and the lengthy process of animation and it can be tough.

FreelanceSwitch: At the tender age of 27 you’ve already achieved so much – what now?
Laith: On Xmas day 2006 I was struck by an idea for a new animation; a dark love story between a prisoner and a firefly that spend some time together then separate. The separation acts as a catalyst for the prisoners escape but not to the world outside. The next 2 months saw me feverishly trying to bring this idea to life and at least get it started.

The site currently shows a preview/teaser of the animation – the opening minute or so of the story. The whole piece would be about 4 minutes and features a Moby track which I feel fits perfectly with the tone and feel I’m trying to capture. In a similar way to ‘Creep’ the Everloving animation was inspired by personal experiences and as such is a highly personal project.

The animation is a heavy hybrid of Flash and After Effects, with a tiny bit of 3D. The prisoner and the firefly are animated in flash then exported as individual body-part PNG sequences. In After Effects these parts are re-assembled then filters and additional layers are used to achieve a pseudo-3d look. The characters are then comped into the prison scenes which are static renders from 3D Studio Max, touched up in Photoshop.

Because Everloving is currently a personal project I’m afraid it’s almost impossible for me to set a completion date at the moment. I’m very passionate about finishing it but to it will need proper funding, time and additional help to fully realise. Plus I have to now take some time out to work on another new project…

‘If I had a Ray Gun’ is a children’s picture book due to be published in America later this year and I’ve been asked to illustrate it. It’s a quirky little story about a kid who dreams of having a ray-gun that could blast away stuff he doesn’t like. I had similar fantasies as a child (though I think there was more gore and suffering in my day-dreams) so I’m really looking forward to working on it.

On a more holistic level there are about 4 million other things I want to do, each more potentially fatal than the last. If I don’t get them all done in my life, my only regret will be that I didn’t get them all done.

FreelanceSwitch: Thank you for your time, Laith!
Laith: My pleasure. When do I get my money?