"Baby on the J" is a claymation music video, using New York City’s subway system and scenery as inspiration. Made as part of my BFA thesis project as well as to promote the song my partner wrote about our unlikely meeting on the J train.

 

 

    Baby on the J is a music video exploring themes of fate-found love in the New York City’s subway system, using a Claymation approach to animation. Incorporating references from the New York City subway system, Brooklyn’s landscape, and combined with a psychedelic approach to animation, this animation explores the unconscious using some Claymation-based transitions to portray this unlikely and passionate love story. The project employs a psychedelic approach to animation because love, similarly to the effects of psychedelic drugs on the human mind, can make people experience the world differently through vivid images, colors, and sensations.
    My love for animation, sculpture and my infatuation with my partner were the inspirations for this project. Baby on the J’s music video was inspired by the song written by my partner at the time. Me been a passionate person who gets lost into the people that he loves, had a vision to pay tribute to the love me and my fiance were experiencing. At the same time creating something that will shine a light in both of our artistic pursuits, her music and me my animation. The story for the animation was based around actual places, actions and feeling we experienced together while in the relationship as well as the plans we had for the future. 

 

    The creative process began with researching animations that use psychedelic style animation as a style and claymation based animations using youtube/vimeo as search engines. During my research the biggest inspirations were; Bruce Bickford’s “City of Tiny Lights” for his use of scale, psychedelic transitions and treatment of the medium, specifically the moment of the characters and movement of the clay during transformations. David Daniels’ “Grizzly Bear — Ready, Able” for it’s character interactions with each other their environments, wide shots and both detailed as well as simple sets. Joan C. Gratz’s “Mona Lisa Descending a Staircase” for the use of clay as paint to create interesting psychedelic transitions. 
    Using my inspiration as a guideline I began to draw a storyboard to illustrate the story visually. The first set of storyboards were rejected due to lack of detail/unreadability.The second set were accepted, they illustrates backgrounds, scene by scene progression and transitions. Using the storyboard I created an animatic which shows the timing of each scene in relation to the music.

 

 

     Made the first set and dolls in order to calculate the time it will take to build all the sets and characters. The same was done in order to determine time that it would take to animate by doing a 2 seconds pencil test. Using these calculations the production calendar was made to set deadlines to each element of the project and stay in schedule. 
    The process of making sets began by using recycled cardboard boxes, measuring, cutting and using hot glue to fuse them together. The challenging part of this process was creating small elements out of cardboard, keeping consistent colors when painting with acrylic paint and small detail like ads and graffiti. The processes of character building was just as difficult. Creating armatures with wire, reinforcing them with epoxy and using magnets as feet which will help with the character’s movement. After the armatures were done the five main character, ten extras were covered in clay and details were sculpted, this process was simple and there were no difficulties while building the character.

 

    Once all elements were ready, I prepared a darkroom in my house by boarding up all the windows and any light source, in order to keep consistent lighting during the animation. A canon 60D camera was set up with a tripod and connected to my laptop running dragon frame. Two large umbrella lights with four fluorescent lights bulbs were used for lighting, the number of lightbulbs used changed depending on the scene and the set.

 

     The first stage was taped to a large table and the camera placed three feet away from the set on a tripod. The character was placed on the set and the frame by frame animation process began.  This process had a big learning curve on moving the characters without completely destroying all sculpted details. The consistency of the clay was very soft and as movement happened the doll’s figure would begin to distort, at some points beyond recognition and this was an issue that continued for the whole process. This was an unexpected issue for me, having to rebuild each figure with every scene and sometimes having to do this multiple times for some scenes. There were some scenes that required to make dolls without armor and slice them a little at a time in order to create the illusion of sinking or emerging on the water. 
    Exploring a new medium (clay) was a challenge that I wanted give myself and something that I’ve wanted to do since I was a child. The process took much longer than expected, about 8 to 12 hours a day, seven days a week at times. Everyday was different, some days I could animate 2 seconds and 12 seconds the next day. Loved animating this piece, however I would not work with claytoons again when sing wire armors as a base for support. Due to the constant rebuilding of the characters that is needed. I loved to work with claytoons when it came time to make the psychedelic transitions and is something that I would to do again. 
    Animating took six weeks which was a lot longer than I had expected, the constant rebuilding of the models ,unexpected technical difficulties and my computer’s fan failing in the middle of post production.

 

 

   The same day that animating was finished I started post production, each scene was exported from dragon frame and imported into Adobe After Effects as video files. There were around twelve takes in total and there were a lot of compositing left to do with only two weeks left. At this point I would only sleep when I crashed, compositing using masking/rotoscoping out the greenscreen elements of video and compositing moving objects/backgrounds to these scenes, took a lot longer than anticipated. After many sleepless nights the post editing was done two days before the show.