A few weeks ago we posted our new music video for our theme song, “A Field Of Birds”. Now, Jonathan Lindley takes us behind the scenes! A few words from Jonny, below…

When i set out to make this animation i had no idea were to start. So, i had to resort to something i knew how to do, or rather something i already felt comfortable with. i ended up drawing the characters before understanding the story or setting and after a while it just built momentum. I’ve always found the start the most difficult, once you get enthusiastic about an idea, thats the time to challenge yourself! If you can do all this your bound to learn something new!

When I started this project, I was strictly a graphic designer, i risked my degree on this video. If it had gone wrong, I would have failed my final major project and not got a degree, which would have bankrupt me and left me qualification-less. Thankfully it all seems to have paid off and people seem to like it.

The scariest part of making it was the first time I watched it! I didn’t watch the video for weeks, I was a good 5 days behind schedule all the time. I was already being forced to cut corners, around the middle of the video I realized that there wasn’t anything interesting happening and nearly had a nervous breakdown. i pulled two all nighters and cut out around 20 moles and managed to animate them in, just in time for the final cut!

In case anyone is considering animation I know now that there are more efficient ways to do all these things but being inexperienced and only planning a limited amount of my animation, I ran out of time for experimentation and had to get on with the making it. I absolutely appreciate animation and the genius behind the trade, when I watch stop motion videos now I just see the time spent on making each scene!

Lip syncing, the bane of my life, well, eventually I found a way around spending years learning how to do this professionally, I was lucky in that the design of the video didn’t need it to be perfect but i still had to figure out a way of timing it rightish… in the end what i did was film myself singing along with the song, and the go through the video frame by frame and just cut out a different mouth that was kinda the same shape. Easily the most boring job ever!

Having said all of this, it was worth it in the end! I am super proud to have helped out a charity, earnt a degree and made a pretty cool little animation for ‘The Tallest Man On Earth’ who I am a big fan of! Then the really scary part was unleashing it to the world which has been very positive and rewarding, again huge thanks to Yellow Bird Project and Huddersfield University!

Jonny

You can watch the “behind the scenes” video on Jonny’s vimeo page and see more pictures on his Flickr page.

And if you still haven’t seen the final cut, watch it here!