Another artful film from the magic bag o’ tricks of Hayley Morris. Beautiful lighting concepts and paper work in this music video for Pure Bathing Culture. She really pushes her materials and medium with an amazing synchronicity of detailed craft, hard work and inspired organic spontaneity. The balance of motion shots, depth of field, angling, and engaging animation conveys flight and all works so well with the music. Read on for some insights into the production from Hayley.

Director Hayley Morris:

    Sean Pecknold, who made Pure Bathing Culture’s music video for “Ivory Coast”, was nice enough to recommend me for the “Dream the Dare” video. I loved the “Ivory Coast” video and song and was really excited to have the opportunity to work with Pure Bathing Culture on this video. I loved this song and their music.

    Dan and Sarah were fantastic to work with. They were drawn to the color palettes I use in my work and the dreamy and somewhat psychedelic imagery from my past videos. They were interested in having me bring this aesthetic into the “Dream the Dare” video. They also suggested using a raven/crow as a possible character to base the idea around. The music has a very beautiful airy and light sound, so I loved the idea of having a raven as the main character. I feel that trying to imagine how it is to fly and going into a bird’s mind was a really great challenge for me as an animator. I wanted to see how the bird would see the world, and this was a lot of fun to figure out in stop-motion. I was really experimenting and improvising throughout this video.

    The film took about 2.5 months to create from start to finish. There was about a month-and-a-half of building the set pieces and puppets and a month of animating. The majority of the set pieces are paper sculpture, My boyfriend Randy Bretzin is an amazing printmaker/artist and he helped me make a lot of the patterned paper that I then used to sculpt into different shapes. I also worked with Caleb Wood who created most of the glowing geometric projections you see in the video. I like my work to push in camera techniques, and projection has allowed me to combine 2-D animations with 3-D in a natural way.

This piece follows her other beautifully executed and groundbreaking music video for Iron and Wine. Wonderful work, Hayley. We look forward to your future artistic evolutions. -Dragonframe