Some notable Animated Music Videos of 2016- part 2

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This part offers even more diversity in animation techniques, as well showcase the varied genre of songs. Let’s get right down to it.

 

Lorn “Anvil” by GERIKO

“He allowed us to choose one track from his latest album and gave us full creative freedom to explore and develop bot the narrative and the aesthetic of the piece. It was a great privilege to be awarded so much trust and creative licence by an artist we deeply admire” – GERIKO

Hands down the most ambitious and ambiguous video out of this list. Inspired by Japanese and Belgian comics, most notably Akira, Ghost in the Shell and the Matrix, Helene Jeudy and Antoine Caëcke (aka GERIKO) created a an incredible science fiction universe in a brilliantly stylish black-and-white animation for Lorn’s song “Anvil.” In this dystopian future in which social networks can manifest in physical ways, invade the body and mind and blow them wide open, a young woman chooses to take her life via a machine and we see every bit of process that she emerges herself to that crazy world there. The subsequent journey our main character embarks on is exquisitely detailed, mesmerizing, and truly compelling visual.

 

Jane Bordeaux Band “Ma’agalim” by Uri Lotan

“The inspiration came from a visit a few years back at Musée Mécanique in San Francisco, a museum devoted to antique penny arcade machines. Walking around the museum there was a feeling that time had stopped. The characters inside the machines have been destined to a never ending cycle repeating the same action over and over again. That metaphor worked perfectly with the lyrics.” – Uri Lotan

“Ma’agalim was conceived in an untraditional way. We contacted the band with the intention of creating them a music video. That gave us complete creative freedom, as long as it was in the spirit of the song.”

I’m gonna be honest, this video melted my heart for its beautiful, detailed yet bittersweet feelings it evokes and the fresh and innovative approach for its story. Ma’agalim is a Hebrew word for “circle”, and as the creator mentioned above this is precisely the theme with this video. We see the characters running in circle, getting stuck in a very specific and endearing place, but that’s why this video has a feeling of timelessness. The video centers around an enchanting, innovative CGI animated wooden penny arcade, packed with as many beautifully designed and whimsy characters. As the arcade rotates and our little girl wanders around, the internal workings of the machine are revealed, showing how it brings an everyday life of those characters in that penny arcade world. An intricately designed, beautifully-executed, and gently poignant achievement in CGI. Many people even go so far to compare this video to the worlds of Pixar for good reasons. My personal favorite pick.

Oldelaf “Les Mains Froides” by Camille Alméras

“The song Les Mains Froides gathers all that we love in the artist’s and group’s world: soft, fun and poetic at the same time, between love and simple happiness, he shares with us one of these perfect moments. A pretty story. Directed and animated by Camille Alméras, who had the perfect idea – as some fans had imagined it – to offer us a cartoon style decor with cardboard, and hands that wander.” – translated from some French blog about the video clip. I know there is an interview about this video lying somewhere in French but finding it is beyond my capability.

That little french video use hands (yes, you read it right. Hands. Los manos. Les mains, whatever) as character designs in a lovely cardboard France settings at night. The video follows a romance story between a couple, where the guy is too shy to make a move but they enjoy the date nonetheless. The use of hands as character designs not only plays extremely well with the theme of the song (and that song is lovely by the way), but also add so much charms to the video. This video also features one of the most inventive and whimsical love-making scene to the point you can show the video to the children and still can get away with it (it’s just hands-rubbing you see, or even “Kiddo, look at this, THAT how you wash your hands properly”). The video clip really reminds us the charms of being in love and spend the time with the person you interested in.

 

Shirley Collins ‘Pretty Polly‘ by Layla Atkinson

“My initial thoughts were to shoot the puppets on green screen then add in the backgrounds using After Effects but the prospect of spending a chunk of the summer sitting in a hot room, staring at a screen and trying to key out puppets and then creating ‘handmade’ artwork in Photoshop did not seem that enticing. After listening to the song a couple more times I gratefully ditched the green screen idea and, inspired by the timbre of Shirley’s voice and the stripped back music, decided to create something different. I wanted to use rough cardboard and simple drawings inspired by American folk art combined with beautiful lighting to form the video’s aesthetic handwriting. I then decided to make my life harder still by keeping the camera locked off at all times and shooting scenes in real time with no edits or cutaways so the final piece would feel more like watching a play than a film.” – Layla Atkinson

Now we get to where the variations of animation technique really shines. This song Pretty Polly is a ballad set in America during the time of the Revolution. Like many of our good ol’ folk songs that would tell you an entire story, Pretty Polly is a straightforward tale of good-hearted love about the girl who decided to enlist to the army to fight with her love. The video use the traditional “Jig Doll” puppets- wooden dolls that are controlled with long sticks and jig about on a vibrating board. Shot on film over two days with a locked-off camera and no edits or cutaways, this handmade piece of puppetry has too many moving parts to comprehend. The sets were all made from cardboard and then painted onto them. It’s this handmade feeling that brings the mood out of that bygone era and like what Atkinson wanted, the video operates more like watching a play. In the end, the joy of watching this video lie in how witnessing the story progress and listening to that tale feel just like hearing one of our bedtime stories.

 

Ralf Hildenbeutel ‘Disco‘ by Boris Seewald

“I felt that I needed a hobby, I needed something different, something to do with my hands. So what could it be? So I thought about painting and said, let’s give it a try. And somehow when I started it I didn’t think it was going to be a video, just something for myself, do something new… And Painting is a good idea” – Boris Seewald

“…whenever we work on a project, it’s not that one side finishes his video or music and then it’s the other one’s turn. The work on image and sound happens simultaneously, always adjusting to each other’s updated version.” – Ralf Hildenbeutel

For Disco, the director Boris Seewald used rotoscoping to transform the movements of two dancers into a continuous series of approximately 1,250 drawings and paintings on paper. Now considering this, for standard frame rate in movie and TV we often use 24 frames per second; thus a minute long would produce approximately 1,440 frames. The creators here nearly produce an animated footage with frame rates that close to live-action standard. The drawings and paintings of each frame were created with a variety of media (ink, watercolor, charcoal, etc) and the lines which define the dancers’ bodies and faces shift constantly. Many frames contain splatters of ink or paint which accentuate the rhythm of the music and sometimes operate as lines of energy – extending from fingertips to express the effort masked by the dancers’ calm expressions. Their faces are enhanced by the animation, gaining a certain intensity through the sketchy lines and colors that describe them. The last quarter of the film switches from white background to black background, producing a striking visual contrast that reflects a tonal shift in the music. If you enjoyed the smooth ice skate routines in Yuri!! on Ice, then I bet this video will take your breath away.

 

BONUS: THE WORST ANIMATION IN 2016 MUSIC VIDEO

Yeasayer “I am Chemistry” by New Media Ltd

“We were given absolute carte blanche by the label and band, which was wonderful. The idea of an endlessly mutating character was there from the start. The only directive was to tie-in, with Yeasayer’s album cover: a photo of an installation of a sculpture series they commissioned from David Altmejd. Three of the sculptures were of the band members, which we turned into animatable 3D models. We built out the world, sculpting parts of the landscape out of clay and applied motion capture to Altmejd’s sculptures to record everything.” – New Media Ltd team

I’m torn between this. On one hand, I know that this freaky CGI visual style serves to add the eerie atmosphere and the feel for the video, moreover I’m all for bands and artists that have a singular voice and keeps pushing what make them unique; in this case: creepy nauseous CGI claymation morphing art style (and actually, this video is when they put it to good use). The actual CGI in this video, on the other hand, is horrible and really make me think that, 20 years from now when we watch this video back, we can find it informative for its limitation of creating realistic CGI, though in all fairness the creators never attempt to make these look real to begin with. Hayao Mizayaki went all his way to bashed out AI animation and its creepy art design and movement as an “insult to life itself” and I can see some of his points have merit here. I honestly don’t know, at the end of the day I still enjoy this song and weirdly this video but I do think there’s the line of animation quality we shouldn’t cross. Making something intentionally bad have to have a deeper point beside for the sake of being creepy and different. No, I don’t think this video is bad at all but I think the animation in it is terrible, horrible and awful and not in a good ways.