Hot on the heels of my smash hit Ukulele Bonk video (and my sleeper hit Bercée d’illusions video), I am pleased and proud to present a new, hand-animated video for my 2024 track Driven By Desire about making art in the age of slop machines.

If you’re curious (and since some people asked), here’s how it was made. CW: probably TMI!

Animation

Since the launch of The Indie Beat Television, I thought it would be fun and appropriate to make a crude, hand-animated video for this track about the slopapocalypse. Then version 2.0 of Procreate Dreams, an animation program for iPad based on the acclaimed Procreate drawing app, came out, and I figured I would try that.

I started creating short animations in Procreate Dreams on my iPad mini, usually while sipping coffee in bed in the mornings. As the days rolled by, I settled more or less consciously on a few arbitrary rules for the video:

• I selected a single, silly photo of myself and decided I wouldn’t use any others
• All the drawing animations would be done by hand, one image at a time, the old-fashioned way
• I would only draw using thick, rough, dirty brushes
• Keyframe animations would only be used to animate the photo and the backgrounds (and to cycle through colors)

The cool thing about Procreate Dreams, is that you can layer and group and mix flipbook animations and keyframe animations. And each flipbook animation can have multiple tracks, plus use drawing layers. I only scratched the surface of what this program can do!

It also has a lot of export options, so that simplified things a lot.

Once I had a fairly decent bunch of snippets, I started thinking about how to assemble them.

Final Assembly

Then, as luck would have it, a new version of Final Cut Pro was released, which added beat detection to audio files (in order to be able to snap video clips to the beat), a huge potential time server! But I first had to upgrade my macOS to install the new version, and it turned out the beat detection feature has a nasty crash bug which I had to figure out how to circumvent.

• importing audio snippets back into some Procreate Dreams animations, and adjusting the animations to match the tempo as best as I could
• having to tediously stretch or shorten certain clips a little in FCP to snap them more or less to the bars and beats

I tried to use FCP as little as possible to animate things, even though it has a keyframing system. I ended up doing cut animations when I zoom in or out of a clip, and animating the 2 small flying heads that float up behind the big flying head. I also used a couple of FCP plugins to shake certain clips (the second part of the Love me 2 clip for example).

One thing I did use though, was green-screen keying. I modified certain animations in Procreate Dreams to add a green screen background so I could composite them into the video (the bouncing sound wave in part 2 for example).

Finally, to answer another question I got in the chat when the video premiered on The Indie Beat Television, the assembly phase in FCP (and going back and forth into Procreate Dreams to tweak things) took a couple of days.

I ended up making more animations than I actually used (see the one below), and had to make a few hard choices, but it is precisely the accumulation of countless choices, big and small, conscious and unconscious, logical or arbitrary and driven by desire that is missing in slop, which is one of the many reasons it is so utterly soulless.

Thank…

Hot on the heels of my Ukulele Bonk video, which went kind of viral for a few days among my followers on Mastodon, comes a simpler, more subdued video for Bercée d’illusions, a song from my last EP that I’m particularly fond of. Like the previous video, it premiered on The Indie Beat Television, during the new Friday Fresh hour, and the lovely people in the chat seemed to like it.

All shots in the video are 100% real and in real-time, which seems worth mentioning in a world choking on slop.

Well that escalated quickly.

I made a video for Ukulele Bonk, my contribution to The Four Seasons of Bonk Wave: A Midsummer Bonk’s Dream 1, in a single cold winter day, and barely a week after the launch of The Indie Beat Television.

This is actually the first real video that I’ve made since... 2018!

As a seasoned person, I was alive when MTV launched, and part of me has always lamented the indisputable fact that video killed the radio star. In my experience, many people confuse watching and listening to music, and have lost the ability to separate the two and actually develop a decent ear for what is happening in the music alone.

Nevertheless...

I was part of the small group of musicians corralled by @limebar@mastodon.social to prepare the launch of #TIBtv, and seeing the excitement before, during, and after the launch was, well, an eye-opener. And contagious. Not only that, but the variety and quality and originality and ingenuity of the videos blew my mind.

(I also contributed some old videos to the channel and the associated songs found a new public, which was a nice bonus.)

Anyway, stimulated by such an amazing display of unbridled creativity, my brain started racing with ideas for new videos, and this is the first one to see the light of day. Others may or may not follow, time will tell, but be that as it may:

Creativity x Community = Inspiration!

Long live #TIBtv!