Animated Music Video

Client: Medeski Martin & Wood Album: Let’s Go Everywhere Song: Where’s The Music

“Ren & Stimpy meets early-childhood-education-based attention game meets awesome sauce.” -Zooglobble

A music video that I created and animated for the renowned NYC “avant-groove” band MEDESKI MARTIN & WOOD. I did the animation using Final Cut Pro, having drawn all the cels in Adobe Illustrator and then importing as jpgs into FCP. Complicated movements such as the camel running sequences were created in Aftereffects by Jessica Plummer. The children’s voices and the breaks in the music are part of the actual song. I extended the breaks to accommodate my narrative idea.

The inspiration for the animation style came from the lo-fi musical numbers that closed every episode of the Fat Albert & The Cosby Kids cartoon. Using the least amount of motion, the animators for Fat Albert were able to keep the musical number fresh even though the same simple movements were repeated every show. My goal for the Where’s The Music vid was the same– to bite the lo-fi flavor and simultaneously keep it fast and not from concentrate.

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WILLIAM WEGMAN ANIMATED SHOW Proposal • 2008

A few images from a pitch for the Nickelodeon Channel that I created along with the artist William Wegman. Wegman, a renowned artist in multiple disciplines (video, painting, photography) has also enjoyed a parallel career making videos, books and calendars for kids that feature his famous dogs. My idea for the Wegman animated show was to focus on Bill’s conceptual art practice and create a script based directly on his autobiography of the process of making his seminal works. I still think audiences would be mesmerized by the incantation of Bill’s deadpan delivery as he voices his animated self recreating projects that are disarmingly simplistic and spontaneous seeming but ultimately come around to pinch your butt. Photos ©William Wegman