Description:

As part of my Advanced Design Techniques film paper I was lucky to be teamed up with the Dunedin band, Black-Sale House to create and produce a music video. The band were enthausiastic to give me complete creative control for the project which was both freeing and daunting. The only caveat was that they wanted the film to be aligned with the meaning of the song. After a number of meetings with the band I got a deeper understanding of what the song really meant to them. The band talked about how the song was inspired by the monotony of life as a student, and the desire to escape to a better place where they could be more inspired and excited. The conceptualising stage began with me wanting to capture the contrast between the dull reality of a student and this better place they’d rather be, and what it could actually look like. Their reality is represented through a muted grainy black and white image set in a mundane location. After lots of testing with different methods I decided to use a form of animation to capture the ‘better place’. The song has a bright, beachy vibe with a R&B influence, I felt a manual animation technique would create more organic visual feeling that compliments the sound best. Bright analogue animation against the black and white live action footage enhances the theme of contrast. My process was that the band was filmed live and then the footage was printed out at 10 frames per second, the prints were traced utilising a light box and then the line drawings accentuated with water color paint. The new painted pages were animated back into sequences using dragon-frame software and a multi plane camera. In the final music video 1000 + frames were manually animated and near 1500 were done digitally. The rotoscoping process was very long and at times I must say tedious, but the result stands true to the bands lyrical meaning and my original creative vision which made it all worth it. Also using analogue techniques enhanced by digital software gives the film an honest and organic visual that fits with the band's initial thinking behind the song. Working with Black-Sale House was a privilege and I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to create so freely and bring ‘Place I Want to Be’ to life on screen.