I’m back with another surprise for you all. As some of you may know, as well as working as an actor and filmmaker I also have yet another side job as a musician. I’ve been taking this a bit more seriosuly lately and decided I wanted to make a music video for one of my songs - well, why wouldn’t you when you have your own production company! Of course it would have been fairly simple for me to shoot some footage of me lip-syncing to the track in a nice location somewhere and edit it all together into a pretty cool video but I’m sure you know me well enough by now to know that I don’t do simple.

Instead I decided to create the entire video using LEGO and stop-motion animation. Before filming even began I had to build all the sets I needed to shoot on, though admittedly this was the fun part. The more gruelling process was the several months it took me to animate the entire video. If you’re not familiar with how stop stop motion animation works then essentally what you do is take a photo of your character, in this case a LEGO man. You then move him very slightly and take another photo and keep repeating this process until you’ve completed the movement you want to do. When you put all the photos together and play them back at speed then you get a moving image and the LEGO man appears to move. It’s actually a pretty simple camera technique but incredibly time consuming. I had nearly five minutes of footage I needed to shoot and in several shots I could have up to twenty characters on screen who all needed moving from one frame to the next. 

I had messed around with stop motion as a kid so I knew what I was getting myself into but I had never attempted anything as complicated as this. Would I do it again? Absolutely! Yes the animation section can be a bit a pain but as long as you know what you want to shoot and have a good plan set out it can actually be quite theraputic. Move the character, take a photo, move the character, take a photo… you get into a sort of rhythm.

Anyway, enough of me waffling on about how I made the music video. Perhaps it would be better if I just showed you… oh and if you like the song please do check it out on iTunes and Spotify!

http://apple.co/1U1lUgM

https://open.spotify.com/album/6SdcI7XsYtEVzWc0MqXxws?si=sL5-mAtxQQO6ugEPmVi2eg