For the strangely hypnotic Editors single Eat Raw Meat, Lee and Wayne Lennox deliver this compelling animated promo, in stark contrast to their last video for Chicane’s Come Back. Happy with their brief from Sony ‘create a dark, twisted, black and white animated music video’ they went out of their way to do just that.

Wayne: “We’re huge fans of Editors and love the track, being asked to pitch was a dream come true. The track sounds almost tribal; a repeated pattern with ghostly chanting voices. We began to think of the visuals retaining the looping patterns and drew our references from early 20th century animations which were constructed soley of repeated cycles”.

Lee: “We immediately started gathering references from some of our favourite animations, and you can’t reference black and white animation without thinking back to ‘Mickey Mouse – Steamboat Willy’. I can remember watching it as a child and loving every moment, since maturing (slightly) I’ve wanted to animate in that style, this project seemed to fit perfectly.

“I created everything using Adobe After Effects CS4; characters were pre-comped with their looping animations, then layered upon the background layers. Even the background photographic images which appear later on were cutout/masked in After Effects. I wanted the video to be completely 2D and retain the way animation used to be created before the arrival of computers, yet I wanted to apply a slight modern 3D aesthetic. Yet it’s completely fake 3D; everything you see on screen is actually 2D; various animators refuse to believe this, but I assure them it’s true.

“I went back to the way Disney utilized multiple layers to recreate the multi-plane method. I went the long way round, it was insanely laborious, but sadistically satisfying to follow in the old school footsteps. The elements were either scaled or shifted from position to position, so no 3D cameras were used, it had to be organic and I constantly thought – how would someone have done this years ago without a computer? It was so tempting to just add a 3D camera into after effects and do it the quick and easy way, but I kept to my word and hopefully managed to achieve what I set out to do: create the appearance of a 3D world utilizing only a 2D method”.

Editors
Eat Raw Meat = Drool Bloody (Sony Music)
Director: The Lennox Brothers
Production Company: Between The Eyes
Animation: Lee Lennox
Representation: OBManagement
Commissioner: Dan Millar
Watch: here