East. West. North. South
Croque monsieur, Croque madame
Maybe if I write something every month or so it’s ok, it needn’t be a magnum opus. Maybe just a mailing list is ok, as promised.
So how did March look ?
Warners contacted me randomly, about making a music video for a young hip hop artist. It seemed an unlikely pairing, and was fun, albeit briefly, bringing back lots of old memories, until they ghosted my hastily assembled treatment. If you see a vaporwave take on Outrun any time soon, you heard it here first.
In terms of the old memories, it’s been 20 years exactly since I made All Night Disco Party for my friend Eamon’s band Brakes. They’d recently signed to Rough Trade and gave me an all but open brief to animate a music video for them. I of course responded by turning them into inuits at an all night rave in the Antarctic.*
*for the penguin fanciers.
Truth is, I scarcely knew what I was doing, I figured out how to use Final Cut Pro to put together the animatic, and through optimism and youthful confidence managed to rope in producer Sam Hope and animators Ste McGregor and Polly Holt, to help animate all of the animals I’d drawn. It was the first time I’d directed anything, having barely been working in animation a year, and I still hark back to it if you catch me after too many drinks.
Or lost on a Monday looking for content.
It’s still a watermark of sorts, my first attempt, moderately successful, receiving an uncredited selection for Special Ten, playlisting on MTV2, and something like early viral success on an embryonic and no frills pre Alphabet youtube.
Despite much cajoling and encouragement from the band, peers, and label bods, I didn’t know how to capitalise on its fleeting success, or what to do next. So I started freelancing as an animator / compositor, and the rest is history. A history.
Coming up to its 20 year anniversary I have been thinking about Brakes a lot, and how I can somehow upres this tiny horizontally compromised file into 4 or even 2K. I am sure I could probably do it in ai, but well .. ya know.
Without getting too navel gazing, I am still working through these same issues that have probably allowed me to work in and around animation for 20 years, without ever quite being the main character. As I’ve got older I’ve found ways to be more at peace with it (kinda), accepting I am a pretty good right hand man, but there are still days where I wish I’d really banged on the door of being a commercial music video director. There was a brief window where it felt like I still could, when I was young and full of ideas and Spotify hadn’t yet devoured the music industry and everyone in it.
But it is what it is, a glorious moment of youthful energy, a punky cartoon before self doubt came to throttle me.
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Speaking of the black dog, our endless dalliance, some fun things of note this month: I took part in a heart circle style creative therapy style workshop of sorts, striving to address the perennial confidence demons, and afterwards I managed to turn around this months contribution for sloth in about 2 hours, so maybe there’s hope.
I am also making my way through
‘s WE NEED YOUR ART, which is great, packed with much needed wisdom and supportive and thoughtful prompting, for anyone else who’s in an endless battle with their own shit.
Also wanted to give a hat tip and a substack welcome to
whose Black Dog tees are once more available …
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Oh look an em dash … until next month, enjoy the Spring time folks x
Beautiful. Life reading these Dyl x