3D + MOTION DESIGN + EDITORIAL DESIGN + VISUAL IDENTITY + ILLUSTRATION
Jad - Odwet
Creating the artwork for 'Odwet' (Revenge) was quite a challenge for me. When you're designing for a band you genuinely like and whose members you know personally, there's an added sense of pressure from the very beginning. On top of that, Jad had already established a very distinctive visual identity. Their album covers, merchandise, and promotional materials all form a cohesive whole, while being quite different from the kind of work I usually create.
In my own work, I tend to pursue balance and calmness. Their aesthetic is driven by aggression and rawness. I remember asking Krzysiek for some stylistic guidelines. He replied that they liked my work and wanted to give me complete creative freedom - I just needed to make my aesthetic a little "dirtier." Framing everything within the language of cut-out and photocopied graphics, infused with the grime and imperfections of DIY zine culture, turned out to be exactly the right approach.
To develop the illustration, I immersed myself in the material, read through the lyrics, and set out to create my own interpretation. I chose to portray revenge as a Pyrrhic victory - a giant brought down through a war of attrition. At the center stands a triumphant man holding a flag, utterly exhausted and surrounded by the casualties of his vengeance.
For the illustration, I incorporated an archival photograph of Napoleon’s death mask. That was how I interpreted the album’s title, Odwet (Revenge). I sent the artwork to the band, and the concept resonated almost immediately. We refined a few details afterward, but the core idea remained unchanged from the very first version.
I feel we succeeded in creating a cover that, despite its different visual language, preserves Jad’s DNA and remains spiritually consistent with the band’s previous releases.
Once the cover artwork was finished, we moved on to the music video. It proved to be an even greater challenge for all of us. We all had experience working on album covers, but this was everyone’s first music video. I’ve been creating animation professionally and independently for years, yet a music video follows a very different set of rules. Each of us had a different vision of what the film should be, but after many conversations, we eventually found a common language.
The video serves as a conceptual continuation of the album cover. At the heart of the animation is the same death mask, seen from a drone’s perspective and immersed in a state of permanent conflict. Images of war and violence merge into a single digital miasma, where the song’s lyrics dissolve, distort, and ultimately disappear.
The contrast between the aggression of Jad’s music and the calm, measured pace of my animations operates on a formal level throughout the piece. Violence, presented through symbolic imagery, gradually undergoes a process of decay. Using image-corruption techniques such as datamoshing, the visual structure slowly breaks apart, suggesting a world in which revenge consumes and destroys everything - and everyone - in its path.
