What’s better than Adam Buxton singing about his teenage son’s moments with frozen pizza? Adam Buxton’s floating head singing about said Pizza Time with the pizza timing going on right behind him. But what’s that irregular glow around his head? Is that a beatific halo? Oh…no…that’s just his animation style.
Animator Guy Larsen explains it like this: “Adam and I met when we cast him in an audio series I co-created called UP IN SMOKE, an eight-part supernatural thriller fiction series. After that, he reached out about directing a single called Pizza Time from his new album. He’d seen my previous stop motion music videos for Cavetown and Orla Gartland, so I pitched ‘Fantasia in Domino’s’ – a kaleidoscopic video using paper cut out pizza elements.”
Pizza Time became a visualizer for Buxton’s new album, Buckle Up. “I didn’t want to use any stock photographs for this,” Larsen went on, “so I went to the shops and bought all the pizzas and toppings.”
So what about that halo on Buxton? “Because I was animating with paper, I took photographs of them all, printed them out on paper and then ripped them out so they kept a nice, textured edge. I could have just snapped a pic and animated that digitally, but that would have meant I lost that nice paper texture and imperfections in the printer ink that shows it’s tactile and hand-made.
“With AI getting popular, what was always appreciated about stop motion animation—namely the craft and time, seems to be appreciated even more.” Indeed.
“The biggest challenge was time,” he told us. “This wasn’t a full music video, just a visualizer that was just over a minute long. Adam is performing the song for the entire time, which was 67 seconds at 12 frames per second. I calculated that was over 800 faces I had to print and individually cut out and animate. I hadn’t realized (or subconsciously allowed myself to!) before starting. It took two full, full days to rip the faces out and another day to animate just that element of the video.”
“The other challenge was an element I animated using liquid tomato purée. I wanted to create a spinning striped background for the chorus made of it. Other than it taking a long time to do, I wasn’t prepared for the smell of it. I thought it would be fine but I describe it as ‘acrid tomato vomit’. I really wasn’t ready for how badly tomato purée would smell in the studio!”
For more on the production see this behind the scenes video made by Larsen himself: