Around March 2021, Australian Musician Trent-Jean (a previous student of my wonderful step-mother Carole) approached me about creating some stop-motion animation for part of their next music video “B4iDie” featuring some vocal samples recorded from his friends Rooster affectionately called “Diamond Dave the Rooster” whilst plans changed for the music video, Trent’s passion remained for incorporating stop-motion elements into the visuals for his new album and singles.
Disc0vr was the next single release and using Diamond Dave’s signature scream to herald in the new sound of his 9th Dimension vision was an epic opportunity.
Social Media currently tends to favour Square 1:1 videos as there is usually nothing cropped and will fit most devices one way or the other ( height for traditional landscape web browsing or width for portrait ‘app’ usage) this used to be more problematic to create cohesive visual campaigns for as different apps and websites would display media differently, even on the same platform but on different devices (facebook for example has about 5 different image dimensions and areas it would crop into depending on which type of page/group/profile/event it was uploaded to, and would sometimes dynamically crop into what it would deem the most interesting part of an image, so utterly terrible from a creative designers point of view) anyway… onto the cool stuff!
Diamond Dave’s puppet needed to be constructed quickly, cheaply yet fairly sturdy, to save time and weight I figured threading some armature wire through 3 shuttlecocks would provide the right shape with just enough sturdiness to hold some clay.
Dave’s head is solid and scultped from super sculpey clay, his beak is in 2 parts the lower part hinged with a wire, baked separately and then re attached afterwards with some holes in his lower jaw area for the wires to be inserted into.
after baking his head needed painting, and the beak varnishing to bring out that solid shine and establish a definition between his face and beak, varnish’s and glues are also used often with foam latex creations in a similar way to create beaks, horns, finger nails, teeth etc
here he is with his first layers of plastacine clay attached really coming to life, wattles and hair needed some movement so they are purely plastacine, the plastacine underneath his beak also helped to support the lower jaw.
eyelids and eyebrows always help with adding expressions to characters
Spotify Canvas
Playing a video in Spotify allows certain users to see looping visuals alongside the music enhancing the experience. What better place for Diamond Dave to strut his stuff?!
The spotify canvas is a portrait video file designed to be played on smartphone devices
Disc0vr OUT NOW!
As a follow up to the teaser promo, Trent-Jean wanted a great impactful reminder to go check out the new single highlighting the catchy hook and lyrics, it was a great opportunity to tweak the timing of the editing from the promo clip to have Diamond Dave sing in time with Trent himself.
Check out the song itself on Spotify below.
It was a great opportunity to work with Trent-Jean and it’s been exciting to see the impact the campaign gaining Trent THOUSANDS of views and new followers on Instagram over night. Then shortly after playing a huge sports stadium concert and interviewed for “The Scene” broadcasted on Australian National television (which may be how you’ve come to my website in which case Hi! hope you liked the animations!)