Posted by Here’s my music video for Nameless Faceless by Courtney Barnett.
This project came together really quickly, I sat down with the song, some CB press photos and smashed it out!
I immediately realised the themes in the song had to be visually approached using dark and absurd humour. It needed to be funny but not make light of the core truth of the Margret Atwood quote; Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them. A Dadaist collage style worked perfectly, and combined with a nod to online gif and meme culture, it all fell together. When I’m making myself laugh out loud while I work, (alone, like a crazy person), I know I’m on the right track.
I had a few special moments late at night, animating by the seat of my pants and seeing it come together, where I felt as though the song had been written especially for me to animate to. I think you need that kind of magic when you’re working on your own, up against a deadline, keeping managers in opposite timezones updated on email, sleep deprived and animating minutes (not mere seconds) of content in time to music. It is killer work, and it’s easy to get half way through animating a music video and freak out about what you’ve gotten yourself into! And how much more you have to go! I’m sure there are a lot of animators out there who suffer from a form of music video related PTSD, I certainly know enough who vow never to make music videos ever again.
Anyway, I was really into making this music video, and even with the short deadline looming I wanted to keep perfecting it and adding to it, and Courtney was like “Yeah! Give Lucy more time! Let’s stick Kim Deal in it, as a cat!”, and Courtney’s awesome managers were like “Absolutely NO time for that! We need it NOW!” And in the end it didn’t need perfecting, in fact it was probably all the better for the rushed finish. Nice and loose and crazy. Though, it would have been cool to have included a recognisable Kim Deal, she is in there, but disguised as a cat, alongside Courtney’s own cat Bubbles.
The final edit was delivered within a few hours of the video being released online, and it all took off from there, leading me into a very busy 2018, hence the nearly 18 months it’s taken for me to write about it. 🙏
Here are some of the places it was featured:
