This week we pinned down one of the directors of Malajube’s new video for Le Crabe and got him to tell us what really went into the making of their newest animated video.
My name is Mihai Wilson, I’m principal of a design and communications company in Vancouver. I do this type of work on the side purely for the love of it. Davide DiSaro lives in Toronto & runs his own animation/mograph company called RUNRUNRUN.
Davide (dav-ee-dah: he’s from Italy) and I started experimenting with animation about two years ago. Last January he came to an art-teaching workshop and stayed at my apartment for four days. During that time we transformed my living room in to a stop-motion studio. Being non-professionals, the only real equipment we had were a ZR-200 DVCam, my PC and StopMotionPro software. We created multiple planes of animation (visible in the deer scene and airplane scenes) by using alpen boxes to prop up glass which we had taken from picture frames.
For art, we mostly pillaged my library of printed objects that my girlfriend and I have collected during our travels around the globe. There are bits an pieces of things from Argentina, India, China. Being an art school dropout I had plenty of paint and other art supplies around the apartment and there was a dollar store down the street where we grabbed some stuff.
Our reason for creating this work was purely experimental. We had no plans to make a video for Malajube. We’re both very interested in animation, particularly lo-fi-compatible styles like stop-motion. We played a lot of music while working and Malajube came on a fair bit, but the connection wasn’t made until a week or so after Davide had gone home. He just happened to be watching the video while listening to “Le Crabe” and was amazed to see the transitions in the song match up with the transitions in the video. We made a few minor edits, uploaded it to the web and sent the link to Dare to Care Records. It was a shot in the dark for us. We got an enthusiastic reply that not only did they want the video, they also wanted to hire us to create another (which is currently in production).
