Today’s dose of Boing Boing tv is an experimental rock animation oddity featuring one of our favorite directors, Syd Garon. It’s a music video for To My Surprise, a band led by The Clown (Shawn Crahan) from nu-metal heavyweights Slipknot.
The video was directed and animated by Syd Garon and Eric Henry with illustrations by Doug Cunningham (of Morning Breath), Lee Ballard, Cristie Henry and The Clown’s daughter, who was 6 years old at the time.
Part of what makes this so interesting to us is the crazy backstory. Syd explains:
The record was produced by Rick Rubin and had some pretty good Beatles-inspired tunes on it if memory serves.
The Clown had a bizarre list of things — completely unrelated to our treatment — which we were required to have in the video. The items were so strange we decided not to even try to fight it. That is why the final video has a pilgrim and a turkey, a rubber dog head, and a rat eating a taco among other oddities.
In addition to “the list” we had to incorporate a bunch of black and white drawings made by his 6 year old daughter. Oh yeah, the drawings had to be playing dodgeball.
We actually had a conversation with an assistant at the record label and spoke the words, “yes there is a rat eating a taco in the video”.
One of the band members refused to have his cartoon likeness anything other than completely realistic. That is why a goddamn imaginary band has a robot with bunny ears, a three eyed Rastafarian and one totally fucking normal guy.
In retrospect, having one normal guy makes the band even stranger in a way I never would have thought of. So, hats off to you, normal guy.
To our surprise the video didn’t totally work. The kids drawings were actually awesome and if I had a time machine I might go back and try making a video just around them instead combining our ideas with The Clowns.
We made this video with the mighty Doug Cunningham at Morning Breath and it was fun to get the Wave Twisters crew back together again.
Link to Boing Boing tv blog post, with downloadable video and instructions on how to subscribe to the BBtv daily video podcast.
Also see: Previous BBtv episodes featuring the work of Syd Garon.