Making a Music Video: “Death to Vivek Kemp”

Working on the video for “Death to Vivek Kemp” was a solitary activity. Except for a few hours spent with The Happy Hollows at the very beginning of the process (shooting some reference video of them playing their instruments), the entire video unfolded over the course of hundreds of hours hunched over a desk. My original discussions with the band about the concept for the video were purposefully vague as I didn’t really know exactly which way the video was going to pull me. However, once I started to get my feet wet converting video footage into hand drawings, it became clear what I wanted to do as well as what limitations I faced based on time constraints.

Pre Production

Having been a fan of The Happy Hollows for a long time, I was eagerly anticipating their full length debut and was thrilled when Charlie gave me a sneak peak at SXSW in March of ’09. I immediately volunteered to do a video for them not knowing which song they’d be interested in doing or even if it would be possible. Later in the year, as they worked out the details for the album’s release, we begin discussing doing a video for

“Death to Vivek Kemp” and I started brainstorming ideas. There were a few but we ended up settling on a hand constructed, animation type video that drew inspiration from their album art.

Reference Video

I knew that even though I wanted to draw all the animation by hand that I would still needed some sort of reference point. In the band’s practice space we set up a white backdrop and some lights and video taped multiple takes of each band member performing “Death to Vivek Kemp”. I still wasn’t exactly sure how the final product would look but I knew I would base it off this video footage. Once I got the footage home I edited it into a music video. The footage wasn’t beautiful but I knew that I was only interested in capturing their silhouettes and tried to edit a video that used their outlines in a dynamic way that worked with the music and showcased each member of the band. Once the rough edit was complete I exported it as a series of still frames at a rate of 12fps, 2,186 frames in all.

Animating by Hand

Now came the difficult and time consuming part, animating by hand. Over the course of 3 months, I would view each of the 2,186 frames individually on my computer monitor, trace it onto an 8.5″ x 11″ piece of paper in pencil, go over the pencil in black felt tip marker, erase the pencil, and than in some cases paint the piece of paper with watercolors. This process was slow, tedious, and painful (literally painful, the fingers on my right hand often lost feeling and remained this way for a month after completion of the project). Most people who saw me working endlessly, drawing frame after frame, only to trace them again in marker asked the same question: “Can’t you just do that on the computer? Why don’t you use After Effects? Or why don’t you have one part that you reuse and repeat?” If only that were the case. I decided early on that I really wanted to capture and convey a DIY aesthetic as well as a hand drawn, organic place of origin; there was no way I saw to seemingly replicate this on a computer. And furthermore, if there was, I didn’t have the know how to make it happen. And for repeating sections or reusing frames more than once, forget about it, it would have been obvious and made me look lazy.

Assembly

Once frames were completed they were scanned back into the computer where they were matched with the video source they were traced from on, exported as a high definition still frame, and then assembled in Final Cut. At this point it would have been beneficial to use After Effects, especially when I added the overlay effects, but my experience with After Effects is limited and I felt more comfortable using Final Cut (even if using Final Cut meant an additional 8 hours of work, but that’s nothing compared with the forty plus hours it took to simply scan all of the frames into the computer). Since all the editing decisions had been made when I edited the rough, reference video at the start of the project, once I had all of the frames (which ended up being over 2,200 in all) sequenced in Final Cut I was done.

Final Notes

I loved working on this video but wish that the process hadn’t been so time consuming, and not for the obvious reason; except for the pain it caused my hand I didn’t mind spending eight hours a day (in addition to my day job) drawing individual video frames. Rather, as I was working on the video I would constantly be coming up with new, exciting ways to make the video more visually dynamic and interesting but was usually unable to implement them. So much of the video was predetermined by early planning which meant that the production process was severely inflexible; if I had come up with a new idea half way through, no matter how fantastic, implementing it would most likely mean scrapping all of the work I had done up to that point and starting over. However, I am completely convinced that doing everything by hand was the right way to go and am constantly surprised and exalted by the level of detail conveyed by the drawings (when you’re animating something at 12fps and it takes a little over an hour to draw three seconds of footage it’s hard to recognize any detail or motion). And as a result of all this detail, most people I’ve shown it to don’t believe me that it was all drawn by hand.

The Final Product