Channel Frederator Blog

Episode 52

An epic deep sea adventure filled with psychedelic, synchronized fish-swimming patterns and muscle-bound heroics. All to the sweet sound of Herva.

This film by Vance Reeser was featured on Episode 4 of the Nicktoons Newtork Animation Festival.

Vance, how did you come up for this spledid idea for a music video?

“I think it started soon after watching The Life Aquatic and I thought, “Man, the colors are amazing, I’d love to animate a story using a similar color theme,” or something to that effect. Also, around that time I had been experimenting with building a simple animation in flash, and then using screen-recording software to record the flash animation live while I “scratched” the timeline back and forth to a beat - like a dj scratching a record kinda.

So when my friend Jamey, aka Herva, asked me to make a video for his electronic album he was working on I thought it a good chance to try these things out in a low-pressure setting. I picked a track from his unfinished album and decided on using the Life Aquatic colors + live scratch animation + a Samurai Jack surreal action vibe. (there are actually only a few scenes that I did the scratch on, see if you can find them! it ended up being really subtle…) That was pretty much my mindset when I started designing stuff and storyboarding. Then I grabbed the local crazy kid Albert and filmed him making fists and angry faces and stuff for his role as the captain - all in my back room here at my apartment/studio with a borrowed DV camera and a couple sheets of blue poster board for a blue screen. So yeah, very lo-fi and no budget as it was a favor for Herva. I also made the Ghost-squid’s skull out of orange play-doh, which was super fun!

My first film (the bear hunt) was really dark and intense, so I wanted to try to do a film that was purely fun and entertaining, but at the same time, I wanted you to feel for the captain and his plight and not just do zany nonsense or whatever - so I think theres some fairly real emotion to it too… I also really wanted to push myself to cram as many juicy ideas as possible into every scene, so it was a really good and fun exercise.”

Compliments to you Vance, and also to Herva. I got in touch with Jamey a while ago about his music, and he was kind enough to give me his CD which KICKS BUTT.

Click here to subscribe to Channel Frederator or go to iTunes. Please send your suggestions to promotecartoons@gmail.com.

Melissa