'The Epicentre'. Pop Music and animation




Me and my pal JD in Sheffield have played music of one sort and another for most of our lives, at least until this part of them when we havn't at all. Having put a song together using toy keyboards and drum machines it struck me as good idea to send it to him for a bit of  distanced collaboration. What came back was great, he surrounded my track with some things that provided good  options and others that once you heard them were instantly right and part of the thing.

Jim Alexander is a pal from Ulverston, we seem to have done a fair bit of work together without really meaning to,,,either for his Fine Art degree or on community drama projects for Dalton Litfest and  Kate Davis. Jim told me of his new animation figures and showed me some exercises and lighting tests he'd done with them.  I was struck by how closely they seemed to follow the narrative of the song, and so I cut the files to fit the first couple of verses, using the same few frames several times in different crops and contexts.  When it all seemed to still work the morning after, I called Jim and showed him what Id done and asked him if he fancied doing the rest.

This is the Horngarth under Covid,  There was also a tale in the paper about a bloke in Rochdale who flounted the first lock down and tried to get to Whitby, because he fancied some chips. And of course there were Jim's 2 figures.

These are a few loose storyboards, some of these sequences were given to Jim in advance of any work, others grew out of what he gave me  In its final form the animation follows the song quite closely until the resolution...the bloke in the video  had to go somewhere, He ends up within the Horngarth video and leave him there,  within the service, within the tradition. - 




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