Directors Kris Merc and Benjy Brooke plumb the depths of addiction, lust and self-destruction for The Peach Kings “Mojo Thunder” official music video. [NSFW]
Despite the convincingly analogue look, the bulk of the project was produced digitally. It wasn’t all ones and zeroes, though.
“A lot of the design we did by hand. Newsprint, white crayon on black cardstock. We tried a lot of things!” explains Merc.
We asked the directors for a little more process behind the project, and they were kind enough to share.
Process: Kris Merc and Benjy Brooke
Kris: Well, on the narrative tip it’s a long story. I wanted to explore self destructive behaviors maybe triggered by an inability to escape the past. Cycles of abuse, pain, vice, lust and ultimately destruction.
Me and Benjy spent hours looking at career criminals. I’m intrigued by the duality of their lives and the complex morally gray areas that dominate their lifestyles. The theme going into this was that sometimes there is a pleasure in vice, even if it hurts us, that sublime feeling controls us. That dichotomy was something explored in the writing we did, and we expanded on that in the design.
Getting personal
Kris: The story is about my relationship with my own father, and I modeled a lot of this around what I saw in myself and father, realizing some parallels in our lives and behaviors. Maybe we as men are defined by our times. I started to embrace this complex emotion to help drive this journey.
There is something horrifying about that realization that I could not ignore. I knew that following that emotion would take me somewhere raw and perhaps even honest, if not strange.
Developing the look
Kris: Visually, Santeria is something I’m close to. I have some practicing family members, and it’s close to me culturally (I’m from the Caribbean). So that set the tone for the look.
Benjy was pumped. Sexy vibes all around. Waves of fluid lust-filled libations fueled by excess. Something real and textural was needed.
At first, me and Benjy spent a lot of time on newsprint — super wide — and just boarded stories that way. Eventually, we cut them all out and remixed it.
Then, we did designs. We played with chalk, black cardboard, pencils, white crayons. We settled on look we were happy with and fleshed it out. There was color, but at some point I opted out of that, preferring to keep the tone just paired down. We pushed for a lot of angularity in shapes, an almost geometric look with hard shadows.
Benjy: When Kris approached me with his graphic — white-on-black sketches and dark, zany written treatment — I could see we were thinking on the same wavelength.
The setup allowed us to pull from our shared obsessions: noir from our childhood (late eighties, early nineties) like Bruce Timm’s “Batman,” Abuli/Bernet’s “Torpedo”, “Sin City,” and goofier yet still unsettling work like Michael Deforge and Max Fleischer’s weirdest Bimbo/Betty/Koko stuff.
Once we nailed the final outline and styleframes, I spent a day drafting the storyboards and turning it into a working animatic. Our timeline for the project was very short (about 1.5 months in total), so we all came at the project with a fast, wet-on-wet approach.
At Ataboy’s studio, I worked with a team of four other animators predominantly in Photoshop. Photoshop animation is a weird beast, not as streamlined or efficient as ToonBoom or TVPaint, but it allows for a really direct, textural animation style. It lets you finalize your frame with a minimum of After Effects compositing and gives a look and feel as close to handmade as a computer can offer.
Kris: It was a fluid process. We would make stuff, then break it, remix, rewrite, re-board, re-animate, edit, stop the record, fast forward it, rewind, and press play, see where we landed and then push it forward.
A lot of trust went into it, since me and Benjy believed in this. Some advice worth offering might be: if you’re going to work for free on a music video, I’d say make sure you love the song, that it speaks to you in an honest way.
I’m a few music videos in deep, and it doesn’t really get any easier. In fact, finding the love and why you even work in the medium is difficult. It becomes a very personal choice. So if you are working for free, make sure it’s worth it, make sure it’s something you care about, and pour yourself in. Let them see your bruises.
Credits
Production Company: Ataboy
Directors:
Kris Merc
Benjy Brooke
Creative Director: Vikkal Parikh
Story: Kris Merc, Benjy Brooke, Vikkal Parikh
Designers: Benjy Brooke, Ellen Su, Kris Merc
Animators: Benjy Brooke, Ellen Su, Zeynep Aydogmus, Scott Wilkinson, Arthur Guttilla, Yana Pan, Monika Norcross, Christine Kim
Compositor: Adam Van Dine
Editor: Jeremy Baumann
3D Artist: Emily Zurl
Storyboards: Takeia Dunlop
Producer: James Howell
Executive Producer: Karen Hennegan
Song credits:
Recorded at Mophonics Music + Sound in Venice, CA
“Mojo Thunder” Produced, Recorded and Mixed by Josh Marcy
Mastering by Kelly Hibbert
℗ and © Mophonics and the Peach Kings