Acclaimed U.K.-based band Bear's Den (Andrew Davie and Kevin Jones) released their new music video today for the first single 'Spiders' from their upcoming album 'Blue Hours', a music video which I was honoured to be trusted with. Creating a visual story for such a moving song was a wonderful experience.
Drawn entirely by hand, using a technique known as rotoscoping, 'Spiders' features over 2,000 individual digital drawings and tells the story of someone attempting to escape the thoughts in their own head. In approaching something like this, the story is first planned and penned, storyboarded then filmed. I shot the scenes over the course of two weeks before constructing an edit and then moving onto the drawings. Like all animation, it's a very time consuming process with much repetition - every second is its own illustration.
In discussing the release of 'Spiders', Davie says "the song is about the fact you can't run away from the things that are bothering you." For me, creating a visual story that reflected and enhanced these feelings was paramount. 'Spiders' speaks strongly to the rumination we all cannot help sometimes falling into, and how when we do this, we can become overwhelmed and our perception of reality suffers. Remembering things not as they were but how we feel about them now, creating a negative headspace that can sometimes be very hard to get out of.
As Davie explains, "we wanted to get across a sense of bravery and triumph in saying, 'sometimes I can't pull myself out' of these difficult situations. To celebrate the difficult moments because we all have them. They are a universally shared experience even if it feels sometimes like they're not and you're the only one who feels them."
To read some some lovely words on the music video and album check out this article by independant music magazine XS Noize.