A Holiday Greeting...Behind-the-Scenes

I love making holiday cards—I always have. Yet every December, around mid-month, I realize it’s almost Christmas and I haven’t a glimmer of an idea of what to do. 

This year, the routine was no different. A few weeks ago, I started looking around my studio at the miscellaneous scraps of cardboard, stickers, styrofoam, and brown paper coffee sleeves I’d collected for inspiration. (Full disclosure: I have a hard time throwing away any piece of sturdy, clean cardboard.) Maybe the materials would guide me to something? 

I started building a mini set peppered with coffee sleeve trees, a construction paper sky, torn up paper towel mountains, and a styrofoam (for snow) stage. Then I thought of a bag of googly eyes I keep deep in a box of materials for book events, and played around with them some. I replaced all the tree lights with googly eyes, and made a quick draft of an animation. It was fun and weird….but not quite right. And I was bummed out. 

The next morning, I texted the clip to my best friend, Lee for an opinion. He liked it, and encouraged me to carry on. Then a few moments after our initial exchange, he wrote again. “The trees kind of remind me of sharks.” And that was it—the spark I’d needed. The added, unspoken, tinge of subversive humor I could quite grasp on my own. And I was off and running. 

At the studio that day, I scrapped my earlier footage and started over. I fine tuned my cast of characters with a special, new guest star—a shark. I built him a Santa hat using a recent acquisition from my mom: her collection of felt scraps. (My mom used to make me felt finger puppets, and full disclosure: she has a hard time throwing away potential craft supplies too.)

Lately, I’ve started dabbling with creating my own sound effects in lieu of using free sounds from online. The Voice Memos app on the iPhone works really well, and is forgivingly simple for an amateur like me. It’s so kooky figuring these things out! That bag of googly eyes I mentioned almost beat out a literal garland of bells for the shark’s sleigh bells sound. And the swimming shark cutting through the icy snow? That’s just a folded up coffee sleeve scrapping against cardboard. Mostly, I have no idea what I’m doing, but I love emersing myself in a let’s-give-it-a-try-and-see-if-it-works-out attitude. 

I drew myself a quick storyboard sequence to keep track of the ideas and effects I wanted to include. Last, I played around with lighting…Well, in reality, I played around a cheapo clamp lamp that would stand in for the setting sun. 

I’m mostly self-taught when it comes to After Effects, the program I use to build my animations. And I’d be nowhere without help from the occasional YouTube video. What’s so rewarding as I get better at AE, is knowing what I want to do, the effect I think I should use, asking the internet if it exists, and so on. And everytime I use AE, I learn something new. It’s rewarding when it works out and feels like magic! I learned a bunch of things this time.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed a glimpse behind-the-scenes. here it is, the final animation. With a special acknowledgement to my pal, Lee for that extra spark!✨

Getting Out of a Work Funk / Part 2: ‘Salva la Tierra’ by Eljuri

[This is the second of a two-part post. You can read part one here.] 

Recurring cast member, the mini turntable.

Back when I was in grad school, one of my classmates was struggling with an important project. In an effort to help, I offered advice on ways to work through it, not realizing her method for seeking out creative answers did not mirror mine. “I don’t use play the way you do,” she said. 

Before this exchange, I had never considered the importance of play for me in relation to work. And I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. Over the past few years, the light-hearted tone of my illustrations has seemed insufficient and unsatisfactory in answer to national and world events as they become more and more distressing and dire. In short, I hadn’t felt like playing. 

Pistachio nuts became a swarm of bees.

Yet finding play is what has historically dug me out of more than a few minor creative blocks. But more recently, I was not giving myself space to take chances, experiment—to make things for the sake of the making things. I had lost touch with what it felt like to make stuff for me. And that’s what that random skateboard deck in part one rekindled. 

Then in the early spring, I was asked by my art director/music producer friend, Alex Gatje to help create a music video, featuring the lyrics of an upcoming single, ‘Salva la Tierra’ by the band Eljuri. She had just a glimmer of an idea for it and wondered if I’d like to create an animation in some way, combining illustration and nature videography…and how would we do that? 

Alex’s wind-up boat box was one of our first “cast” members.

The song ‘Salva la Tierra’ is a call to action to turn back the effects of climate change. Eljuri summed it up best recently:

“Everyone can see the terrible changes that the environment is going through. We are polluting the earth, water, and air. One by one we can help. Small voices can move big companies. This all adds up to real change. Are you with me?”

Alex gave me some keywords to consider as imagery: water, flowers, fish, bugs, sun, clouds, leaves, the Earth, the Sun. And I felt wheels in my brain start turning. Then turn faster and faster. I was hooked—I was excited…and this was going to be completely different than any commissioned project I’d done before. Most of all, it was going to be meaningful AND fun. I soon realized, my sense of play was what just might tie it all together. And I dove in completely.

I’ve made animations before, but mostly promotional book trailers for publishers, and the occasional stop motion clips for my own amusement. I’d never developed anything as complex (or long!) as a music video. Alex described it as a “lyric video” because she wanted the Spanish lyrics to scroll along with the music and imagery. 

For the past two months, virtually all of my waking hours have been completely and joyfully obsessed with this project. Everything within eyeshot became potential material…

Behind the scenes of the opening shot.

One day in late May my husband came home with a beautiful bouquet of yellow flowers. We enjoyed them in their vase for a day or so before I lopped off the blossoms for use in the opening shot. I left those same flowers out for a few weeks to later cast them as seaweed (along with some old, dried rosemary sprigs from our fridge), for the sky and water scenes of fish and bees. And there were random things I’d held onto around my desk. For instance, last year, in order to get free shipping on an order of clothing, I purchased some socks which came in a bright, yellow cardboard box. That box became the base of the mini turntable, featured in several recurring shots of the spinning record album and Earth. 

I had some travel plans this spring, but while away, I was unable to turn off my “asset gathering” mode for the video. While spending a week at the beach, I gathered pinecones to use as background trees and “dancers”. I also made my hostess eat pistachios so I could turn the empty shells into a swarm of bees. I was also spending a lot of time outside, which gave me the opportunity to experiment with time lapse photography for a few of the nature shots. And I had help too: Alex contributed several of the overhead shots and spinning rocks clips. And my friend Jack shot the gorgeous sunset-over-water time lapse scene while we were visiting Tennessee. I even found an  opportunity on the flight home for the final clip I used in the credits. I couldn’t turn my brainstorming off, and it felt great. 

And I got to animate Eljuri. :^)

A pistachio boat features prominently.

In the end, the whole thing was an enormous puzzle. I wasn’t entirely sure how it would come together. But it reminded me how much I love problem-solving through visual media. Bringing all of the elements into After Effects was a challenge, but an extremely rewarding one. And I learned A TON of new things.

Most of all, Alex and Eljuri were there along the way to nudge and encourage me when needed, and keep me on course. They gave me an incredible amount of creative freedom. I’ll always be thankful for the trust they put in me for this important project. 

I love this description from the press release:

“The [‘Salva la Tierra’] video orchestrates fantasy and reality through illustration, stop motion and nature photography and videography. Encouraging people to sing along to the important message, the uplifting video filled with original characters like bees, fish and a boat representing mankind, weave through scenes of nature imploring that we could reverse the effects of climate change if we all work together.”

For more information about Eljuri and upcoming tour dates, visit their website. You can also follow her on social media @eljurimusic.

The single and video, ‘Salva la Tierra’ will release on Friday, July 15, 2022. I’ll be sharing the video on my news blog, along with links to Eljuri’s YouTube page.

¿Estás conmigo?

A still from the final sequence in ‘Salva la Tierra”.