Music Videos

You bring the music and I’ll bring the moving pictures…
 

Popinjay

(The Joy Formidable)

The Popinjay music video was made in collaboration with the band The Joy Formidable. We worked closely developing the narrative and imagery of the animation as well as providing the music.
 
The style of the animation utilises 2D characters in a 3D environment. Everything is made out of paper, and assembled digitally. This was partly due to the need to create something striking an unique, but also as a way of hinting at a sinister fragility that suited the theme and lyrics of the song itself. The end result is a look that Purple Revolver calls, ‘A lovely visual texture’.
 
At the time of writing, the video has had over twenty thousand views on youtube and has gained a rating of 4.93 stars. It has also been shown on MTV throughout Europe.
 
 

My Black Dog

(The Adventures of Loki)

This animated music video for the song, ‘My Black Dog’ by The Adventures of Loki is based on a mixture of Western and traditional Russian folk tales.

I’d like to say that I spent many hours researching Russian folk tales from original texts and spoken re-tellings. However, the truth is that I found Arthur (Swallows and Amazons) Ransome’s ‘Old Peter’s Russian Tales‘ to be a far more enjoyable resource. I’d highly recommend it both as a faithful re-telling of many of these stories and a very good read in general.

In particular the character of Baba Yaga, a witch with iron teeth, seemed to fit into the themes of the song.

Without any lyrics to go on and just the allusion to depression (Churchill called his depression the ‘Black Dog’ ) in the title, I chose to play with the idea of Red Riding Hood and her Black Dog, the wolf, as a character that both leads her into harms way but also provides the impetus for adventure and redemption.

The video has been widely distributed online and has also been shown on MTV channels in Europe and Japan.
 
 

Bones and Glass

(Violet Process)


 
 

The Shitter

(Trev Meaney)


 
 

Psychonautic Odyssey

(Aenaon)


Something a little dark and disturbing from the Greek dark metal band Aenaon.
 
 

Djerzinski

(Richard Keyworth)


 
Djerzinski was a collaborative project with the musician Richard Keyworth.
 
Richard supplied the experimental music, the track Djerzinski, which plays with acoustic and sample based themes. I then created an experimental animation style based entirely on the movement and choreography of 256 straight lines.
 
The movement of the lines is heavily dictated by the musical score, mirroring changes in tempo and pitch to create a synergy with the music.
 
The animation is of the lines themselves rather than the images they depict, although the imagery wanders between abstract shapes and more coherent images, particularly of Berlin City.
 
 

Fingerprints

(Britt Savage)


Britt Savage, and her band, Twang Deluxe, had me on board this project at the word, ‘Theremin’. They wanted an animation that played with the concept of fingerprints, identity and espionage.
 
The song itself had a distinctly 60′s Hitchcock feel about it, leading me to study the work of Saul Bass, one of the greatest graphic designers of the 20th Century, and indisputably the finest film title designer of all time.
 
The result is an animation that plays more like the introduction to an album or a performance than the titles of a film, setting the tone as one of intrigue and mystery.
 
Fingerprints have been used to replace the facial identity of all of the characters, toying with the idea that as far as the law is concerned, identity is based on the constant provable things about a person, rather than what they do and how they look… two things that can easily be disguised. If this was set in more modern times perhaps the faces would have been replaced by DNA, or ID cards.
 
And why the koala?

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