Anatomy of an Op Drop, Part I

My kid brother surprised me by dropping by Casa Disque Drop last night while I was right in the middle of building up my stockpile in preparation for today’s Op Drop at an undisclosed location. Though he’s been hip to the whole Op Drop thing for awhile, having discovered a previous cache of disques a couple months ago whilst rooting around for something to eat, he’s always dismissed it as ‘that part-time job you pay to do, for that French chick who isn’t even aware you’re doing it’…which, to be honest, is a pretty fair assessment.

Surprisingly, though, as he watched me carry out the one-man assembly line of burning, labeling and assembling disques, he showed a genuine interest—almost fascination—with the amount of time and effort that goes into an Op Drop, even before I actually drop the first disque. I managed to corral him into helping—and, by extension, into watching En Concert, which was playing while we worked—and as he labeled one disque after another, it occurred to me that I haven’t really said much about the preparation phases of a successful drop, and often gloss over it in favor of talking about the event of the drop itself. As my kid brother learned last night, though, that’s really only a third of the story.

So here’s the first of three posts, taking us through today’s drop from start to finish. He seemed to find the behind-the-scenes stuff interesting, so maybe you will too. And even if you don’t…enh, at least I got a couple of days’ content out of it.

Phase I: Design

I haven’t fiddled with the design much since the Mark IV DVDs debuted, either in terms of content or the look of the disque and it’s packaging. In the earliest days of Op Drop, though, the disques were constantly evolving. It’s partly due to me never being truly satisfied—even the Mark IV’s, which are vastly superior to earlier iterations of the disque, could stand to be improved on—but mostly because it’s the part of the process I think I enjoy most. I like using my brain (and my rudimentary PhotoShop skills) to figure things out, overcome obstacles and learn new ways to do things in order to improve the end result. It’s easily the most time-consuming part—which is why I haven’t gotten around to designing a Mark V yet—and it usually involved a great deal of trial and error (along with a fair amount of creative use of naughty words), but the hours honestly fly by when I’m in design mode. If not for my poor grasp of mathematics and complete ignorance of physics, I think I probably would have been happiest being an engineer of some sort. Ah well…in another life, maybe.

Eager to get back to the drawing board, but lacking the necessary time and energy to commit to building a Mark V from the ground up, for this drop I decided instead to design a series of stickers I could slap up on public telephones, bus shelters and subway stations in my travels to and from the drop location. I had tons of raw materials on hand: the sticker sheet I use to print the round labels for the disc face and the back of the case also include cut-outs for two 1 ¾ ” x 4 ¾” stickers, and I’ve been stockpiling them for just such an occasion. I whipped up about ten different designs, but the two I settled on for the purposes of this drop were these:




Pretty spiffy, huh?

The URL type on the vertical sticker is a little small, granted, but as I was mainly sticking these next to windows on subways and busses (extremely close to the rider’s face) and on bus shelters (which allows for the reader to get reeeeeal close), I figured I could get away with it. Any larger, and I would have had to shrink the image to accommodate it…but it’s such a striking, iconic visual that I wanted to keep it as large as I could. After all, as aw will tell you, people looooooove that Tinkerbell tattoo…

Though it’s simpler in design, and not quite as iconic, I think the horizontal sticker might actually be more effective in its own way. The type’s bigger for one thing, and the image (while smaller) features Alizée at her most fetching, doing that thing she does—I think it drives home the point pretty clearly that she’s a singer, and a pretty fabulous-looking one at that. These were mainly used on public phones, paper towel dispensers in restrooms, and on signage at subway stations.

The stickers have proven to be the perfect size for my purpose. The only problem is that the adhesive on them isn’t really meant for what I’m doing—the stickers are relatively easy to peel off with a minimal amount of effort. Still, even if they only stay up for a day or two, they’ll have done their thing. It’ll be interesting to see how many remain when I swing back to check on them.