Jess Cope’s intuitive and masterful storytelling engages both our emotions and curiosity again, and takes us on another ride with “Drive Home.” This music video for Steven Wilson follows her other video for the same album. There is a subtle and entrancing power in the way she slowly reveals layers and leaves plenty of room for the viewer to fill in the blanks. She employs a nice transition from 2D to puppetry to seamlessly depict memory versus realtime events. The impact of the sensitive animation is as strong as it is moving. Her films may be shorts, but, they certainly feel of feature length quality. Read on to hear some fun details from Jess about the shoot.
Director Jess Cope:
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- The music video “Drive Home” was directed by myself and was based on a story written by Steven Wilson and Hajo Müeller for the album “The Raven that Refused to Sing”. It is a combination of cut out animation on glass and Stop motion sets. It was filmed in Manchester UK in a really short time frame of 4 months and had a very small crew. It was filmed on Canon DLSR’s and edited in Final Cut Pro. Compositing and some of the effects were done using After Effects.
The entire set, props, characters, etc. were all covered in real newspaper that had been torn so that only text was showing. This was to unify the two different types of animation. I think we went through around 30 newspapers to cover everything. Unfortunately I didn’t have time to check the text before sticking it down so there are a few words on the main characters head that probably shouldn’t be there.
Vaseline was used to create the water and this was probably the hardest thing to control in the film as it was impossible not mess up half way through the shot! It created an amazing effect though and was well worth all the stress it caused. It was our first time using green screen so unfortunately due to time constraints we did have problems with green spill but I think out editor did a pretty good job of hiding it.
-Happily humble words for such great work. -Dragonframe