Submarine Channel
These artists really worked their asses off to get your attention with their impressive animated music videos. Witness the meticulously constructed landscapes in the cross-country road trip of a couple of pairs of boots in Poon and Makarenko’s stop-motion promo for Zeus. Or the Gorillaz-inspired animated narrative for Spanish hip-hopper El Chojin, who envisions himself as a rugged but tormented superheroe. Paul Murphy’s flabbergasting line animation for The Fumes is the icing on this weeks 2Pause cake! We asked Murphy how he did it in this interview.Paul Murphy on creating Rogue River Women for The Fumes
This music video was a clash of ideas that were floating around in my head at the time. The main inspiration came from the Penguin version of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”. Throughout the book there were sketches of faces drawn by Ken Kesey. The faces that really spoke to me were the ones that were drawn with a few lines or even a single line, they were simple but amazing. I wanted to use the single-line idea and see how far I could take it.
When I first heard the song, the first notes really hit hard. The song just kicked ass, and it seemed to get bigger and bigger. I wanted to capture that in my music video. Drawing inspiration from the Kesey sketches, I visualized the clip starting off with a single line and then when the guitars kick in I saw the line turn into an explosion.
I was constantly taking inspiration from how the song made me feel at the time, and I used that to shape the music video. As I was creating it, I was never more than one note ahead, I wanted each image to be drawn in the moment. This was a daunting way to make the video, but it was also exciting. I was stuck at some point, but then I thought back to the original idea and I would usually be able to solve the problem pretty quickly.
Every picture (excluding the obvious magazine photo cut-outs) was drawn or painted by me. I drew the pictures with crayons and I tried to adhere to the one line rule as best as possible. From there I scanned them onto my laptop and put them into After Effects to arrange them however I wanted. I made sure that the pictures were timed up with the music as best as possible.
Overall I’m really happy with how the music video turned out and I look forward to experimenting again with hand drawn pictures.
