Halloween 2012: New Stop Motion Video! The Heavy - Can't Play Dead

Hey! Happy Halloween everyone!

First up: I hope that all of my east coast pals are staying as warm and dry as they can!

Second up: I have just a short post here to follow up on that "something is brewing for Halloween" teaser in my most recent mid-year missive, and I hope you all enjoy it:

Here's the skinny:

In one of my favorite projects to date, I was hired by British rock & soul band The Heavy to direct a stop motion video for their song "Can't Play Dead" (the lead-off track for their 2012 album The Glorious Dead). How exactly did this happen? They saw the "Halloween" video that I posted here last year! Yeah! Utter madness! Holy smokes but I love the internet.

So: because the guys in the band are so ridiculously cool, they (and their swell label NinjaTune) pretty much gave me complete freedom to play around with whatever spooky nonsense I wanted. As a result I really had a blast -- from the plotting to the sculpting to set design to the animation itself; the whole process was really just tons of fun. It was even profiled on Entertainment Weekly! Very crazy stuff.

And hey! I hope you like it too!

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Annnnnnnd just for good measure, here's a gallery mixing a few "behind the scenes" stills in with production shots from most of the video setups.

If you click through to the complete Flickr set you'll find that I tried to spell out as many of the steps and resources in the text as I could, just in case anyone reading this is itching to give stop motion animation a shot. Do it!

In fact while I'm at it, let me just take special care to mention the fantastic "Animasapien XL" armatures that I used from Julian Clarke Studios, and the amazingly informative puppet-making "how-to" blueprint that Nick Hilligoss outlines in his YouTube video tutorials "Making Latex Build-Up Puppet Head" and "Make a Buildup Puppet". Great, great stuff.

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Happy Halloween!