Out of Hiding

What does Hidy Thing represent now that we are out of hiding?

Can the form be longer? Must the music loop? Is it still a hidy thing if we use more than 5 animation layers? How about if I add texture to it, or noise? Can our colourful Hidents™ hold a narrative and have everything still loop at the same time ?

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Samantha’s recently released Loopy & Esther, in collaboration with Ida Wenøe, was the perfect chance to test some of these questions for real - their densely layered Maxi EP of songs, vignettes and field recordings has a broad sonic palette yet is still very experimental; less Balearic with a strong conceptual throughline, containing all manner of visual ideas to animate while the more classical songwriting lends itself to more traditional narrative music videos.

One of the key features we’ve tried to hold onto from our earliest hidy things is that sense of play, and fun, and experimentation.

I didn’t want these longer efforts to default to a traditional animation pipeline, preplanning from storyboards to design to animation to delivery, so in order to hold onto some of the flavour of fun I am building up layers of assets, mattes and looping elements from the iPad, to be mixed together in After Effects. I am trying to create a process of working that feels closer to VJing or DJing than traditional linear animation.

When I overthink it, or overplan it, the magic gets lost somehow.

Over the last few months of 2024 I created 3 music videos for Loopy & Esther, as we develop a more fluid method of animation and music into live performance for 2025.

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Lily Pad Blues

Much of the album was recorded from the confines of a canoe trip Samantha and Ida took through Denmark, and shared photos with me of the fauna and flora they saw along the way. At under a minute this track is something of a taster for the album proper and the new process I was working with.

All of the individual animated loops are made in Looom on the iPad, where you can set the bpm and fps independently of each other. Looom has always been our staple, and adhering to our hidything house style we kept this one free of texture, with popping vectors and weaving loops, adding some grading and an endless camera.

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Bless The Telephone

I first intended to make this video in a photo collage style, inspired by retro phones I kept seeing on instagram, their outlandish designs and oversize keypads that colourful melding of optimism and melancholia we recognise in obsolete tech.

I started to wonder who held the copyright and / or some of their origins, and couldn’t always tell if they were real photos or ai.

So I decided instead to animate everything in loopy hidy style, in most cases inspired by genuine 80s / 90s handsets, a mix of British and Danish designs. So I can now tell a Viscount from a Princess, and found a love for the sweet candy colourways of the Bang + Olufsen Beocom.

It felt important not to include any mobiles or smartphones - for me the timely power of the lyrics seems to sit between the connective promise of the Telephone, and our post internet awareness of how our relationship with our “phone” has forever changed.

I um and ahh over wether analogue textures are ok with digital process, but once I found the actual risograph palette and scanned grains online, I went all in, recreating as authentic a 4 colour separation process as I could, for extra nostalgia 🖨️

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Little Bird

In a forest in Sweden we’d taken a wrong path, a little red robin lay before us like a warning. A dead little bird. A red little bird.

Samantha & Ida kept turning the phrase over in their minds, their mouths, playing and repeating and editing and lobbing it back and forth. Its a joy to see this process up close, often phrases seem to be plucked direct from the ether.

Back in our first lockdown forays we animated so many birds, gulls, swifts, ducks, tits et al, I wanted to focus on the feather itself, its kinship with a flame in the cold, the robin red like a fading heartbeat and a setting sun in the cold black winters night.

Animation can be such a cumbersome, unwieldy process, of iterative, endless development ad nauseam. In expanding our hidything language outwards to make promos for the album, I keep trying to hold onto these first ideas, of loops at play.