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!