This is the music video Gerkinman and I made several years ago back during 2008/2009.
It was a simpler time back then. I had been working for Weebl for only a few months and was quite excited since it felt like my career was finally getting past the starting line (I was very naive back then). Then my buddy Gerkinman appears, known by his real life name Daniel Elliot, and known by the Ukatchu tribe of Tanzania as “He Who Kicks the Geese”. Where he got said title I do not know it is a story that he never tells.
At the time Gerkinman was living in Australia and was pretty much loathing it. Australia does not have much in the way in the animation or graphic design these days and he was doing work that greatly displeased him. I’m not sure exactly how he got into contact with the band known as The Basics.
I think it might have something to do with some people he knew from the newly-created aussie studio Rubber House. Regardless, he got familiar with the basics. Who are the Basics? A lovely band whose frontrunner you might know under the name Gotye. Yes THAT Gotye.
So you can imagine my confusion and excitement when Gerkinman came to me, covered in spears and goose down and wounds, informing me that we needed to collaborate. I had known Gerkinman for a good while before that. We had similar tastes in art and were both refugees from a formerly popular animation website. He’s a good friend whom I still chat with almost daily. At the moment he’s working on a show coming to Netflix in the near future.
Anyway, my memory is foggy on all that happened next but I know we ended up deciding to make a music video that was a tribute to giant japanese monster shows and films. Kaiju fighting on an island, with lots of destruction and slapstick silliness. We fiddled with concepts and influences and eventually settled on an art style that was sort of a mix between Joel Trussell, Hiroyuki Imaishi, and a dash of Kandinsky simplified into a very paper-doll sort of look.
Characters within the video are inspired from all sorts of things. The big robot is sort of a combo of an EVA from Evangelion and a ZAKU suit from Gundam. The band appear in the video dressed in superhero costumes that are sort of a mix of Kamen Rider uniforms and Ultraman and Jet Jaguar. And the monsters are just made up Kaiju. Big and silly and ridiculous.
Gerkinman storyboarded most of it and then we each animated a few scenes between the two of us, generally alternating. We both designed a lot of buildings for the backgrounds and shared them between the two of us. There was a definite color palette we stuck to and rarely strayed from. Oranges, reds, yellows, pastel green and deep dark blue colors for most of the backdrops with the kaiju in shot. The main kaiju was sky blue and brown so it would stick out amongst the buildings. And then the opposite for the mech. Since the mech was red we generally tried to keep backdrops full of colors that would keep it from blending in too much. Characters were usually shaded with thick black shadows but buildings were shaded with darker tones of their base for the most part.
And then we worked on it for a long time and it was finished! And the band played it behind them when they did shows and such, and Gerkinman even got to attend one of those shows. It’s still one of the biggest things I ever worked on and aired a few times on tv over in Australia on RageTV. It’s nice to have it on Vimeo now in HD quality with the most recent version of the song playing on it.
And now you know the full story of this music video!
