Simply put, Lord Whitney are ‘Connoisseurs of Make-believe’ – they are a creative studio with designers Amy Lord and Rebekah Whitney taking the helm. Alongside their team of designers, producers and set builders, they build worlds for music video, editorials, advertising and much more. Art direction and set design are the name of the game!

What role does music play in your day-to-day lives as creatives?:

Music is a massive part of life at Lord Whitney, we’re definitely not at a quiet work space by any means! There’s usually music playing all day long… It’s pretty eclectic – everyone in our team brings something different to the mix. From our designer Jess singing her head off to show tunes, to Jonny one of our set builders blaring out dancehall in the workshop.

Music keeps us lively – for slumpy afternoons – to powering through mega budgets, keeping us pumped whilst making – to inflicting our singing on van drivers on late night drives back from shoots. Some of the tracks we’ve chosen have even ended up as kind of anthems to shoots too. Once on set Ski Sunday accidentally came on shuffle and was played full blast to a team of 40 very confused people, needless to say our super-cool cover was blown. We’re really not cool, we’re usually about a year behind new releases (or just stuck in the 80s!) and often get Beks’ younger brother to make us a ‘Dope Choones’ playlists to try and hide this fact.

Tell us about your playlist:

We’re all about playfulness; so having fun is definitely reflected in our song choices. The Mighty Boosh is pretty much why we started Lord Whitney, it inspired us to do what we do, so we had to put Dreadlock Holiday on the playlist – you gotta love Bob Fossil and his pocket cup. Music is another kind of world that we love to immerse ourselves in, and it definitely influences our work. We love 80s tunes so much that we once made 20 fake 80s-inspired album covers for a project called ‘Mock n Roll’, and went as far as commissioning musicians to write a song for each one. I think it’s safe to say we definitely don’t do things by halves.

A big part of our summer is festivals, when we first started LW we joined a traveling art circus (as you do) and toured lots of them. As a promise, every year we hang out just as mates, no mention of work and go and get very silly in some muddy fields. Some of these ‘choones’ have become classic anthems for us over the years. All My Friends is one of those – it represents an important side of Lord Whitney – at the end of the day we’re just a group of mates, having fun.

@LordWhitney
http://www.lordwhitney.co.uk