Watch video: Download MP4, YouTube, subtitles at Dotsub.
Boing Boing Video proudly debuts a new piece from the “great god almighty could it get any more awesome?” N.A.S.A. music project, this one from two personal music heroes: Tom Waits, and Kool Keith. The track is called Spacious Thoughts, and you can pick it up on the project’s debut album, Spirit of Apollo (Amazon link.)
NASA, short for “North America South America,” is a music collaboration project assembled by Squeak E. Clean (aka Sam Spiegel, brother of film director Spike Jonze) and DJ Zegon (Ze Gonzales, professional skateboarder).
The music video embedded above was created by Montreal-based Fluorescent Hill, and I asked collaborators Mark Lomond and Johanne Ste-Marie a few questions about how all that crazy magic came together. Below, and after the jump, are their replies.
BB: Tell me a little about Fluorescent Hill? Who are you guys, where are
you, what do you do?
Fluorescent Hill: Well, we’re a very small collective of artists, basically myself (mark
lomond) and johanne ste-marie.
we started working together while in school here in Montreal, along with
some other friends. So we’ve
been together for almost eight years. We do design, illustration,
animation, live action,
basically anything artistic, but with a primary focus on film.
BB: How did the NASA video project come together, and what were your first
thoughts when you learned what track and what
musical artists would be involved?
Fluorescent Hill: We got an email one day describing the entire
NASA project, the musicians involved the visual
artists involved and it just blew our minds. As soon as I saw the list of
musicians, deep in my brain I already was hoping
to work on the Kool Keith and Tom Waits collab. They’re two artists that I
go way back to my early tape buying days with. So when we finally got on the phone, and they said it was this track
“Spacious Thoughts” a small peice of my brain exploded.
Then when they sent the track I was absolutely just ecstatic.
Then came the realisation that our work would be seen by such artists as
Marcel Dzama, Syd Garon, Barry McGee,
Shepard Fairey, etc.. and panic set in. So we had to step it up in every way.
BB: Can you tell us a little about the characters we see in the video? I
love the anthropomorphization of Tom Waits’
voice — it’s as if the very sound of his voice, not Waits as a person, is
being brought to life. Same thing with the
bouncing, spherical ball critter. How did these beings take form?
Fluorescent Hill: Well the characters went through a couple stages of redesign. At first he
was more of a giant oninon, and then cleaned
up into a drop of oil. We initially were going to do the character in 2D
and the backgrounds would be 3D. But then
we just flipped everything 180 degrees as a challenge to ourselves,
because we had never really done a fully animated
3d character and it would force us to rethink how we approach everything.
Also the challenge of going from 2d drawing to realizing it in 3d
changed the overall design adding more to it and streamlinig other aspects.
We also wanted both Tom Waits Oil Drop/Bouncing Ball character and Kool
Keiths’ to essentially be the same in design but different in
movement and colour, like different aspects or personalities of the same
person.
The giant Cloud in the chorus was the first thing we came up with. We felt
the chorus had to be big, and Waits’ voice is just so huge
you just have to go with something towering over the rest of the video,
and in this case the city….which ended up working out really
well for the lyrics in that section. Also we didn’t want to do caricatures
of the singers, it had been done before with waits, I believe
Ralph Bakshi had anmiated/rotoscoped him, so to try and just get at the
quick pop of Kool Keith and the growl and bark of Tom Waits.
BB: How did the project progress, how long did it take? Can you talk us
through a little of the “making of”?
Fluorescent Hill: For the video we tried to mix as many mediums as possible. We had access
to the shipping docks here in Montreal and so we went down and
photographed all the nooks and crannies, then made collages out of th
photos, then redrew the collages. The character animation took a
long time,one because we had never done 3d before, and two because it’s
just the two of us. OUr friend and frequent collaborator
Jacques Khouri modeled and rigged the character, he’s a wizard…. and
also teaches at Savannagh college of art and design.
The cloud character is made up of so many things it’d be pretty hard to
explain 3d 2d vector hand drawn particle etc.
you name it, we did it.
This was the longest production we’ve ever done.
BB: What do you love most, and hate most, about animation?
Fluorescent Hill: I love everything about animation, sounds cheezy, but it’s true. You can
really do everything you can think of and more. The only thing we hate
is the amount of time it takes, but i guess if we had more people it would
go faster, but we like the control we have over every frame.
BB: Favorite part of this project?
Fluorescent Hill: Our absolute favourite part is the mix of the music and visual. We think
it’s a really fun mix, and hope people get some enjoyment out of it
and will want to watch it over and over again.
(Special thanks to Susan Applegate and Syd Garon)