Very excited to finally share this!
This video took a long, long time to make.
As I was wrapping up production on the entire Nutcracker EP (think I finished around June 2019), the idea came up that we needed videos to help promote. At first, I tried some more typical Johnny things… using old footage and messing around with it. Some of those videos are posted on our IGTV. But they never felt like anything special. We talked about some sort of animated video, but I was always hesitant… mostly because I knew anything like that would take a super long time.
Now, I’ve done some animation in the past. My old roomate and I animated a music video for an old project of mine back in the early days of Johnny. And these type of things take MONTHS of 16-hour days, all super zeroed in.
Funny enough, the solution that finally got me to decide to do it was Maddie’s. She suggested just having a white backdrop, rather than designed a background for every scene. I knew that would cut down on my workload substantially and I also liked the idea of how it would look. So I started to dream up the sequence and figure out how to best go about production.
I took the album cover by my old friend Stephanie Macleod and cut out the primary figures of the Nutcracker and Claire. I then created digital ‘puppies’ that I could keyframe animate in Adobe Premiere. The sequences that were more complicated I created frame by frame in Photoshop. For example, the shot where the nutcracker breakdances was something like 96 frames. Some of the other puppets I had to create myself, but I used elements of Stephanie’s album art to give them a similar texture.
I essentially disappeared into my computer for a few months, taking it one shot at a time. I have two monitors set up on my desk and I had The Office running most all the time. Definitely ran through the entire 9-season run and then some.
But thank God it’s finally out and everyone can see it.
One final thought… working on this video was really eye-opening in the way that I saw that animation can continue to be a big focus for JS, albeit in different ways. So, you can expect more. I already have plans for the first single off the next album and an idea for the follow record as well. So yeah. Lots more deep dives en route.