Animated Lyric Video - 'THIS' by These Are Houseplants
‘THIS’, by These Are Houseplants from their album Sidereal Time, is the second animated video I’ve created for my client, Forrest York.
Forrest, musician & guitarist for These Are Houseplants and owner of a guitar store, reached out a little over a year after we completed our first project together-an Animated Music Video for the song ‘This Letter’ by These Are Houseplants-which you can watch and learn about in length further down this page.
Forrest reached out to share a new song he’d like me animate and said ‘It’s a song about NOTHING’. I was immediately intrigued!
Video Process: The Making of 'THIS' by These Are Houseplants
For this video, Forrest communicated to me that he wanted to go in a completely different direction than our previous project together- a 4 minute + fully hand drawn, stop- motion-inspired animation.
This time, I chose to use a cleaner and more fluid style: 2D motion graphics with colorful, flat vector shapes. Along with that, I thought animating to this song was a great opportunity to use a lyric approach to show the lyrics of the song on screen-since the lyrics to a song about nothing may seem random- along with an interacting and integrated animation.
Forrest gave me quite a bit of flexibility when it came to interpreting this song. Because the song was ‘a song about nothing’, my thinking was that I’d like to make the visual experience have a sense of SOMETHING to both balance out the full viewing and listening experience while making the animation oddly interesting.
As I developed the storyboard, I began to envision the video in three main parts:
- Music Introduction
- The Lyrics. &
- Music Breaks.
part one: Music Introduction
To start, the beginning of the music video is a 35 second ‘introduction’ that leads up to the first lyrics. I knew that my job was to make things interesting right out of the gate and varied enough to grab and hold the viewer’s attention up to the beginning of the lyrics.
Forrest had let me know that the percussion at the beginning of the video was actually created using household kitchen items!! I thought that was really unique and not something that needed a lot of interpretation. So I did my best to make that virtual kitchen scene.
I wanted viewers to wonder something along the lines of ‘Why is the drum beat being shown by drumsticks hitting kitchen-like items!?’ But upon hearing the song, I knew that the SOUND of the music and the beat was a star worth drawing attention to it was my job to get the viewer to settle in to the strong, unique introduction of the percussion with a simple but unique show.
From there, there is a color change and then the introduction of another unique element-A Chapman Stick player. For one, not many people know what a Chapman Stick is.
Forrest was adamant that we represented this instrument as correctly I could and I could appreciated that. I loved the sound it created for the music track and it’s a very interesting visual! Along with the introduction of the Chapman Stick is the intro of the Chapman Stick player-and then shortly after the Guitar Player-before you see a ‘visual blast’ and a focus on these two characters jamming out
From this point on, you see these two playing their instruments and it eventually leads to the first lyrics.
Part Two: The Lyrics
At around the 35 second mark, the lyrics start-both audibly and visibly.
Given that ‘THIS’ is a song about ‘nothing’, the lyrics weren’t necessarily connected but I wanted the lyrics to ‘make sense’ visually while being apparently disparate to the ear and mind. I envisioned there being a connecting theme within the lyrics and I made it my job to visually find it. I wanted viewers to walk away thinking something like:
‘Huh, that was kinda ’trippy’ and different. Pretty cool. I liked it!’
I represented the majority of the visual storytelling in the lyric portions of the video by working to establish a continuously connective visual narrative based off of the visual associations that could be conjured by the meaning of the words.
For example-look at the lyrics and then the photos below them:
spoken words, orange juice, patterns lost in thought abuse
If you watch this portion of the video, you’ll notice that the ‘spoken words’ visual is of a pair of lips that speaks while fingers hold a mic. Then as the lyric states ‘orange juice’, all of those same shapes transform to accommodate the meaning of the new words spoken-the mic bottom becomes a glass, the mic top becomes an orange, the fingers become portions of the orange, and the lips become juice squeezed out of the orange.
Then the juice flows into a bottle for the ‘patterns lost’ lyric, whose shape becomes the ‘frame’ for the visual lyric representation of the lyric ‘thought abuse’, which is an imprisoned face.
Or look at this next snippet of lyrics and the photos that follow:
I hate fleas , but they like me, I think i’ve lost my only key
As the lyrics ‘I hate fleas’ are sung, the fleas transition as former eyes from a previously present face and they land on top of the now vacant, circular face. Then, the lyrics sing out ‘but they like me’ as the remaining lips on the face move.
From there, all of the shapes within the circle/face (including the fleas) transition and join to form the top of a key on an oblong future keyring. And finally, you see that overall shape has become a keyring with a now fully-formed key as the lyrics state ‘I think I’ve lost my only key.’
These are a couple examples of how I treated all the lyrics within this song. My approach was based on pattern recognition and idea association and wanting the visuals to make some kind of sense-even if the lyrics didn’t seem to.
Part Three: Music Breaks
The last areas of the song that I conceptualized were the music breaks. I knew that I wanted the parts of the song that were ‘music only’ to contain short snippets or longer scenes where the musicians who were part of the creation of the song, playing their instruments.
There are two main areas or places where I placed the musicians.
1. The guitar player (which aligns with the actual sound) plays in the 7 second music breaks, of which there are two.
2. Both the guitar and violin players are in the slightly longer music breaks of 15 seconds or so in the middle of the video and at the end.
The end scene also contains an appearance of the lead singer belting out the final words of the song, and a second reappearance of the Chapman Stick player next to the guitar and violin player.
In all of these areas where the musicians are seen playing their respective instruments, I wanted to create a sort of abstract, ‘liminal space’. Most of the song is fluid, taking the viewer on a ‘trippy adventure’ of sorts and it’s these music breaks offer an opportunity where the viewer can pause and settle.
The function of seeing the human musicians playing during these musical breaks is to tie the viewer to the reality that very talented musicians made this song and also to the idea of a balance between ‘always transitional movement’ and creative repose.
It isn’t until the very end scene, as the lyrics yell ‘There Isn’t More Than This!’, for the last time that I want to viewer to rest and take in what they just watched. And that is that!
Thank you for reading and learning about the creation process of this Animated Lyric Video for ‘THIS’ by These Are Houseplants! It’s always a creative adventure to make an animated music video.
Animated Music Video - 'This Letter' by These Are Houseplants
‘This Letter’ by the band These Are Houseplants is an animated music video project that I co-created with the lead co-writer of the song, Forrest York.
The song, ‘This Letter’, comes from the 1993 album aptly named after the band’s namesake, These Are Houseplants. Forrest reached out to me about creating this animated music video because he had seen an animated music video I had created 10 years earlier and was a fan of the work he’d seen.
Forrest owns a guitar store located in Murfreesboro, TN and is also locally known for the music camps he puts on for kids. But he himself is also a talented writer, guitarist, and musician. This was one artist and creative businessperson working with another artist and creative person and a very enjoyable project to put together mostly for art’s sake!
Video Process: The Making of 'This Letter' By These are houseplants
The initial creative process began with Forrest sharing his ideas and overall vision for the video. He had both a clear vision and was also open to my interpretations. The things that he knew he wanted were the following: A strong main female character, the setting of a house, and plants-lots of growing plants! I thought this was very fitting because the band’s name is These Are Houseplants.
I love that the project began with Forrest mailing me a CD! It reminded me of being a teenager in the 90s and buying music. This act lete me know this project was one that aligned with how I like to things, which is both simply and down to earth. Here’s the physical copy of the album I received:
The creation process was fairly straightforward for this video. We did 2 rounds of storyboards in black and white, and then I did a partial color storyboard. The rest was lots and lots of drawing (and coloring)! As you’ll see, the animation was done in a partial stop-motion manner. This was partly because the video was long (almost 5 minutes) but we also had to factor in budget and time considerations while still committing to a full 2-D animation. There are no motion graphics used in the video as it’s a frame-by-frame style of animation with a variable frame rate. The video was completed in 4 months time.
The song itself, ‘This Letter’ , is about a relationship that is obviously on the rocks and is coming to an end. The song comes from the female heart and perspective (with co-writing from Colin York too) and speaks to the grievances and pains associated with the loss of love.
Forrest voiced a strong preferences for the creation of always-growing plants in the video. Though we never spoke about the symbolic meaning of the growing plants, to me the plants continuously growing came to represent the perennial nature of life and love, endings and new beginnings, and the vulnerability, persistence, and fertility of the human heart.
Forrest suggested some use of ‘psychedelic’ elements within the chorus too. Taking his lead on that, I thought the choruses were a good way to ‘transport’ the viewer visually. For each chorus, it’s as if the lead singer, Colin York, enters an emotional stormy reverie where she travels into a different realm. Plants and their growing double as a sad and austere female face surrounded by even more growing plants.
The chorus lyrics ring out several times throughout the video:
‘It’s not that we don’t talk, we do
It’s just that what we say isn’t what we mean
And I don’t know what we mean anymore’
And then at the end of every chorus, I decided it would be good to bring the viewer back to the unfolding, linear storyline that travels up to and through all the verses.
Traveling and winding, as if on a journey, was also a theme of the video.
The video begins with traveling through a forest, and then in verse 2 the young woman drives away from the house with her pets. And again, we see her traveling on wooded late night roads and in early morning deserts to show her winding and shifting emotions. The visual storytelling functioned as a way for the song to continue to move along, travel, and wind its way, both with sadness for the past but with hope for the future.
My main additions to the conceptual process were the forest scene, the driving scenes, the double imagery of the chorus, the unique landscapes, the crumbling house at the end, and connecting all these together in a meaningful way while housing all of Forrest’s suggestions that began the vision of the video.
As I sat down to storyboard and I began to listen to the song many times, I kept envisioning (ironically) a forest to launch the video. The music occurred to me as moody and mysterious and Forrest had communicated he wanted some of the first, rooting visuals of the video to involve a young woman sitting down and writing a letter at night to match up with the lyrics ‘I left the window open in the back of the house, as I wrote this letter to you late last night’. And since I knew that this was the destination, I wanted to start the video in the ‘deep woods’ on a dirt road that would eventually lead to the woman writing the letter.
Forrest had a great vision for the project but he also had some great feedback. My favorite contribution to the video that he gave was his feedback on the video’s final 40 seconds or so. I initially was a little ‘gun-shy’ about trying to illustrate for the piano that played at the end of the music track but I’m happy that Forrest pushed for it.
In storyboard version #1, I had the idea to have the house crumbling. From the rubble of the collapsed house, the letter from the beginning of the video emerges, floats high into sky beyond the trees and then comes back down to land on the ground with no particular focus other than the letter itself.
Forrest noted that he would enjoy seeing a piano being played after the house crumbles by the supporting male character in the video. That feedback helped ground the ending of the video into a shared focus between the cascading letter (which was written in the beginning of the video) and the man playing the piano. The message is one of where his playing of the piano symbolically ‘carrys the tune’ of new beginnings for her and him both with him being a symbol of her commitment to her future journey (although we don’t get to physically see her at the video’s ending).
The project was smooth, enjoyable, and Forrest expressed that he loved the video and it moved him emotionally. That’s really the best reaction I can ask for as a video creator!