Merry Christmas everyone!

...make the yuletide gay! :)

and the 4th Animal is...

How I made a stop-motion animation video for a song about the Wizard of Oz

Well it's finally done!
In total it's taken us almost 2 months to finish this video. That's about 4 weeks of me actually finding the time to plan the story and make and paint all the sets and wire-frame figures, then a few days of intense stop-frame animation followed by an interesting evening spent in Paul and Sean's kitchen with a camcorder, a desk light, a torch and a strobe light.

Editing it though caused so many problems, not least the tedious amount of time it took to sync everything up with the music. The main problem I had was my crappy version of Premier kept skipping out the light frames in the strobe sections everytime I tried to export them leaving big black sections. After trying it everyway I possibly could I was reduced to using 'print screen' and cropping each individual light frame in photoshop before importing them back into the project.

I had to do this over 400 times...

So considering how this was made once again I couldn't be happier with how 'professional' the final product looks!

PLEASE LEAVE US A COMMENT AND LET US KNOW WHAT YOU THINK!

- Andy xo


THANKS THANKS THANKS TO THE TWO JOHNNYS!

Jon James for helping with all the animation and
Jonny Jones for filming the strobe segments

Watch the high quality flash version here http://www.outfromanimals.com

You can watch it on youtube here : http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=TxWmEL3HwDU&fmt=6

Or for possibly better quality (both are pretty compressed unfortunately) on facebook here : http://www.facebook.com/video/?id=6088068683

Filming the video for "No Place Like Home"

We're in the middle of filming a new video for 'No Place Like Home'. It's being made in a similar way to the video of National Curriculum with stop motion animation. I've made and painted sets and wire-frame models from scratch and this time we're filming a more traditional short, film; animating figures.

These are the figures I've made and painted :

Dorothy

Scarecrow

Tin man

Lion and Toto

Witch

Sepia Dorothy

Munchkins

Like the song, the video loosly follows the story of the Wizard of Oz.

Check out the video of us filming it here :

http://www.new.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=39484886941

and here are some pictures :

And the rest of the stuuuudiooo

I'm going to finally let you know how the rest of the recording went. I managed to write blogs for the first two day because I was just sat in the back of the control room while Sean and Paul recorded their parts. Once I actually got around to recording on the third day I didn't stop till it was over! The tracks are online now so you can hear the finished results.

Recording the guitar was an interesting process. I've only got a cheap valve-state Marshall amp which does the job but heavy distortion always sounds fucking boring to me on record. I wanted something interesting, not just a wall of noise. We ended up hiring a vintage 15 watt amp. It only had one sound but it was something I couldn't have gotten with my amp. Listen to the main riff on 'Helicopter Parents' to hear what I'm on about. We also wired the guitar through the mini moog again for the bridge section on 'No Place Like Home' for the fuzzy build-up sound.

We loved the vintage guitar amp so much that we ended up doing loads with it. We wanted all the synth parts to have some more life to them so we blasted them all through it into a stone room and recorded that. We even threw the drum and bass parts through it as well and put them under the clean recordings for a good vibe.

Vocals are vocals to be fair. All I know is it knackers me out recording them and we spent a good two days getting them right; but not too right. One of the main things we wanted to do when we recorded this time was to try and get the same sound on record that we have live.

We mixed down London at Moloko studios for 3 and a half days. Paul and I went down to put our input in but this is the first time when we've been involved in the production process that I've felt I could really trust our producer. We really thought hard about all the sounds and parts to decide what was really needed and what just got in the way. In the end the songs sound great, not too cluttered and everything there is there for a reason.

Have a listen and let us know what you think!

Andy xo

Day 2 in the studio

We've finished the drums now; we've spent a good amount of the day on them. It's really important to get the drums perfect as they're the foundation of the songs. We've also spent the time recording extra drum fills and using them as samples over the main drum parts. Sean's also brought his congas and percussion instruments in for more rhythm and it all sounds real fucking fat.

Paul's recording his bass parts now. We're using input from three different sources, a mic on the amp, a direct input from the bass and we've also wired his bass through a vintage mini-moog so we can fuck around with the sound. As I said the studio we're in belongs to the lead singer of OMD so today we've been getting out a load of synths, modern and vintage and having a play… I still haven't really done anything yet apart from eat loads but I'm not moaning cause once I start doing stuff tomorrow I won't be stopping till the mix is finished. xo

In the studio: Day 1

Day 1 in the studio
Current mood: fucking wired

I'm in the studio at the moment on my laptop so just thought I'd let you know what we're up to! We're in the Motor Museum studio in Liverpool owned by Andy McCluskey from OMD (yes you know who OMD are, listen : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01SBf0tsLyI&feature=related )

Our producer this time is James Lewis who's just done the Cajun Dance Party album amongst others and he's well up for making everything sound nice and dirty. ha ha We're recording three new songs, if you've been to see us recently you would have heard them.

1) Up All Night

2) Helicopter Parents

3) No Place Like Home

Today we had a shit deal to start with, we hired a studio kit cause Sean's is far too well gigged to record with, especially since I'm always jumping on it and throwing it about. Problem was it sounded shiiit! It'd just come from Bestival so that makes it more of a live kit than a studio kit. It was far too boomy so now we're using OMD's kit to record. Sean's in the live room now recording drums on No Place Like Home, the boy's a fucking metronome to be fair. Paul and I have done nothing really apart from eat crap and drink a stupid amount of coffee.

It took a long time to get going because we were sorting through synth parts and samples for hours but at this rate with Sean we should get a good amount of these drums done today! I'll write again tomorrow and let you know how Paul's getting on with his Bass. xox