I just made an animation video for my new song Foghorn Calling,
the 2nd single from the new album Shapes of the Fall (pre-order here).
I wanted to share a little bit of the process with you. I spent a few days drawing all the individual pictures using charcoal on paper and then put them all together with the music to build a visual narrative for the animation.
The song is inspired by Mediterranean trance traditions from southern Italy to the Maghreb, the foghorn is sounding the alarm of the earth’s potential environmental collapse and the devastating loss of biodiversity. The trance is a call for positive action and healing, to step out of the darkness toward the light.
The beauty of stop motion animation is actually how few images you need to create the illusion of movement.
With the individual human and animal heads, the sequences were often 4 or 5 images long and then looped. 2 with the eyes open, varying the background and changing some details in the pupils of the eyes and then 2 more with eyes half open and then shut!
The same principle worked for the dancers. Having them turn in circles allowed me to create a mesmerising animated loop. It never ceases to amaze me when we watch this kind of animation technique how the brain compensates for the missing information between the images of the turning figure to make it so believable.
