Mike Aho shows you how he did it for his song I Called You Back.
This project came about after doing an animated video for Jennifer Herrema and RTX. She is a long-time friend of Will Oldham and passed the word along that I was interested in doing something with him. I asked him if he wanted to do a video for 'I called you back' off of 'The Letting Go' because it is my favorite song on that record. They just released a live album called, 'Wilding in the West', so he wanted me to use that version of 'I Called You Back' instead of the studio version.

I don't really remember how I came up with the concept for the animation. I really liked the idea of someone going to a house tucked away in the country, building a small house inside and watching a film of some sort. All the images are meant to convey the idea of escapism and I guess the loom of our eventual death. As I was doing the drawings I decided that the stranger and more random the world that the dog walked through was; the more it would be an analogy for life and it's chance happenings, disasters and unexpected happiness.

I don't know if all of these ideas come through, but that's what was intended.

I started by building this little set out of the box from a case of Charles Shaw wine. Cheap wine is delicious and I'm finding out that my grandpa was right when he said 'the more I drink . . . the thirstier I get' (I just like that saying). At this point I was contemplating doing all of the drawings, cutting them out and doing stop-frame animation, but decided the house-building process would be easier to convey if it was animated with key-frames in After Affects. I took some photos of this set and used them for all of the shots inside the house.

After I built the little set and sprinkled some dirt and sticks in there, I began the long process of sketching and inking all of the drawings that would eventually be cut up in Photoshop for animating in After Affects.

I originally wanted to complete all of the drawings before doing any computer work, but was too anxious to see it how it was going to look so I went in intervals-couple days drawing, couple days working on the computer.

Then I got to break away for a night and hang out with my homies Mel and Travis in Echo Park.

I worked on this portrait of Bonnie that night and they helped me with some kind critiquing, though I still don't know why Travis had to take all his clothes off to show me how to draw a Bonnie's face with more 'determination'.

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After all the drawings were finished for the first act, I began to really dig into animating. I learned After Affects on my own, so I'm definitely not the person to be giving a tutorial on how to animate something, but I'll explain a little bit about how I animated the dog. I just thought of it as a puppet and broke apart the limbs at the major joints in Photoshop. (It helps to feather the cuts so you can't see the breaks as much once they are moving).

After that was done I watched my dog walk around a lot. The way dog's legs move is pretty weird and really hard to capture with this kind of crude animation.

Once the file is in After Affects and you can select the rotation points of each layer and move them accordingly by creating key-frames for start and stop points. It was pretty hard to get it to flow as well as I wanted it to. I'm not sure it ever really got there, but this is what I ended up with.

After the Dog animation was complete it was time to create the world he was walking through. I just kind of did this in a stream-of-consciousness kind of way; building each little scenario as it came into my head.

I cheated a little here and there by using some drawings that I had already done. This crowd flower is from a panel that I made for the Wilting Wonder show that Fudge, Sieben, Mel Kadel and myself had at Lab 101 last September.

These are some of the drawings

So are these

I wanted the dog scene stuff to have a bit of a puppet-show-set feeling to it, so I did most of the characters on pieces of cardboard that I cut into shapes first and then painted little faces and bodies on. I was really shooting for a Henry Darger inspired world, or at least my version of that.

Basically the whole process consisted of drawing, scanning, making Photoshop files that had all of the movable parts separated, bringing them into after effects and creating the shots. Each little scene was exported as it's own movie.

Then I brought them into after Final Cut to edit them together. This all could have been done in after effects, but I wanted the whole thing to have a grainy, film quality to it. So I chose to edit in Final Cut because it allows for a more natural editing flow and it's easier to see things as you are doing them. A lot of times in After Effects you have to export the movie to watch it in real-time and then go back to make changes-unless you have that super computer from war games.

While finishing up the Bonnie video and working on this blog; I received a little package from mr. sieben, filled with drawings and these little dudes. We are beginning a video for my music project called ((sounder)).

Here's what it's looking like so far.

I'm a huge Will Oldham fan so this was a pleasure to work on, and even more exciting was really dissecting the song and find ways to create analogies for the lyrics without them becoming too obvious or beating people over the head with anything too tangible.

I guess that's it for 'How to make a video for Bonnie 'Prince' Billy. The video is now live on the interweb, here on Fecal, Youtube and various music websites, so tell a friend to check it out. Additionally he asked me to do 3 tee shirt designs for him, so keep your eyes peeled for those.

Hope you enjoy.
-mike aho {moscomment}

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