Getting Your Hands On The Documentary And What It Actually Covers
I spent a decent chunk of time tracking down proper copies of the Storm Thorgerson documentary over the years, mostly because the DVD release was patchy and the online options have gotten weirder as time went on. The thing most people are searching for is called The Gathering Storm, which came out around 2006, directed by Nigel Sinclair. It's not a full-length feature documentary in the traditional sense. It's more of a well-produced retrospective with interviews, studio footage, and walkthroughs of how Thorgerson approached some of his most famous album covers. The runtime is roughly 55 minutes to an hour depending on your source. The documentary follows Thorgerson through the creation of several iconic covers. You see the setup for the Pink Floyd pieces — the concrete chamber on Wish You Were Here, the burning man on Animals, the massive inflatable pig on Walled Animals. But it also covers his work outside Pink Floyd, which is where a lot of people get surprised. He did covers for Led Zeppelin, Uriah Heep, Soft Machine, and a whole bunch of prog and rock records in the seventies that are now considered design classics. The actual value of this documentary isn't in narration or analysis. It's in seeing the process. You get to watch him explain why he made certain choices, show the original photography sessions, and talk about the technical limitations they were working under. Things like how they did the double exposure on Meddle's Echoes single without digital tools, or how the Dark Side Of The Moon prism was a practical setup they built on set, not something added in post.
Where People Go Wrong Looking For It
I ran into this a few times when helping people track down sources. Most search results for Storm Thorgerson documentaries lead to pirated YouTube uploads that are recorded from a VHS tape at a 3 AM screening, or DVD rips with terrible aspect ratio cropping. The original broadcast was 4:3 standard definition. Any widescreen version you find is either manipulated or a completely different cut. There's also a common confusion with another release called Classic Albums: Dark Side Of The Moon. That documentary covers the album production, not Thorgerson's art direction specifically. They overlap but they're different things. If you're looking for the album art focus, you want The Gathering Storm. One edge case I hit recently: I was trying to digitize my DVD copy and the region coding on the disc was mismatched with my player. The workaround was switching to a Panasonic universal player that I had sitting in a drawer from an old project. It read the disc without region restrictions and the MPEG-2 file dumped cleanly. If you don't have that setup, a USB DVD drive with libdvdcss handling on Linux works too, though you'll need to install the codec libraries separately.
What The Documentary Gets Right And Where It Falls Short
The strength of this documentary is the access. Hipgnosis, the design partnership between Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell, didn't keep detailed archives of their early work. A lot of the photography from the seventies sessions is lost or scattered across private collections. This film captures Thorgerson's own recollections while he was still actively working, which makes it a primary source document in a way most people don't appreciate. The weakness is the coverage gap. The documentary focuses heavily on the Pink Floyd era and doesn't give much attention to Thorgerson's later work with bands like Porcupine Tree, Muse, or Radiohead. If you're coming to this because you only know him from the recent decades, you'll find the coverage incomplete. There's also very little discussion of the business side of his career — how Hipgnosis operated as a company, the contract disputes, the financial arrangements. That's all there, but it's glossed over. Another thing the documentary doesn't address directly is the question of authorship. Thorgerson was the named designer, but Hipgnosis was a partnership. Aubrey Powell's contributions are mentioned but never explored in depth. Anyone who's looked into this further will tell you the division of labor between the two was more collaborative than the credits suggest.
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Practical Viewing Notes
If you're watching this for reference work — which is what most designers and photographers use it for — here's what I've found useful. Pause during the Wish You Were Here segment and study the lighting setup they used for the bald man. They shot him against a black background with a single hard light source positioned to create that stark silhouette effect. The technique is straightforward but the execution required precise timing since the actor was performing a scripted sequence. The Animals section shows the pig inflation process. What they don't fully explain on camera is that the location shooting at Pyrford Road was done without official permits. Thorgerson and his crew set up overnight and moved quickly. This is something to keep in mind if you're researching how these covers were produced under constraint. The limitations were often self-imposed rather than technical. For the Meddle echography sequence, Thorgerson used a custom-built tank with a glass bottom and underwater lighting. The visual effect was achieved by filming sound waves propagating through water, not through any digital manipulation. If you're trying to replicate something similar, start with a clear container, a shallow depth of water, and a high-speed camera. The original was shot at 1000 frames per second on specialized film stock.
Supplementary Material Worth Looking Into
After watching the documentary, the next thing most people look for is the book Picture This, which is a collection of Thorgerson's artwork with commentary. It's more comprehensive than the film and includes pieces that weren't featured in The Gathering Storm. There's also the Storm Thorgerson Archive website, which has a catalog of his work organized by artist and year. The archive is maintained by his team and updated periodically, though the interface hasn't changed much since it was first built. If you're doing research for a project or paper, the British Film Institute has a copy of The Gathering Storm in their catalogue. They don't allow home viewing but you can request screening access through their study center. It's a slower route than buying the DVD but the print quality is significantly better if you need to reference specific frames.
