WONDERboom have released the first single from their latest album, Great Escape. The band needs no introduction and the song is exactly why they have been an SA treasure for twenty years.
The animated music video for Great Escape is a sci-fi fairy tale about escaping evil with the one you love. “The video depicts two lovers/heroes stuck on an alien planet who break free and escape through the galaxy. Action and chase ensues until the twist at the end,” explains WONDERboom frontman Cito.
He says Roger Adrian Williams at Rog Kreativ presented the band with just the right treatment for the project. “Classic comic book with Sin-City-style animation to real images. Black and white to give it a vintage yet timeless feel,” he describes. Director, editor and animator, Williams had the vision and the skills to conceptualise, illustrate, direct and edit the video.
“We were basically looking to make a video in a way we’ve never done before,” says Cito. The band especially enjoyed not featuring in the video the whole time. “The song’s sound inspired images of adventure and escape,” adds Cito.
Williams says “The brief was for an animated music video, centred on some sort of escape or adventure to visualise the song. We played with many ideas: escaping from some sort of confinement, a prison, war zone, whorehouse, hostage situation… Eventually we decided to go with an epic escape from an alien planet.”
The production team consisted of Wiliams and Eleanor Barkes taking the project from concept to execution, including pre and post-production, direction and animation.
The band scenes were filmed using a green screen at Phoenix Studios in Johannesburg. Shot in 12 hours in February 2016. The heroes were shot in Cape Town.
“It was fun for us to do some acting and not just the usual musical performance stuff,” says Cito. His 19-year-old son acted as the villain aliens that they had to fight against. “So, it was lank fun beating each other up. Using my mic as some hardcore mace-type weapon was silly but appealed to my child inside. It was also cool skateboarding around the studio,” describes Cito.
“The whole story acts as a metaphor for the lyrics of the song, which touches upon ideas of solidarity, love, internal and external conflicts and fighting for what you believe in,” explains Williams. He says they wanted to create a slick, yet classic look and feel for the space adventure, without going very futuristic or over the top with the outer space elements. “We then developed a black and white, illustrated style which had elements of old frame-by-frame or cel animation, rich textures and areas where we composited the live footage of the band, making them morph in and out of their illustrated forms while battling aliens and assisting their friends on their journey,” describes Williams.
The video was shot entirely on a Canon DSLRs 7D, 70D and 550D, using prime lenses only, as well as a Sony action camera. “It was all done in studio, and we managed to keep the equipment down to a minimum to get the shots that we needed for the animation,” explains Williams. He says the animation was done at eight frames per second, combining a line drawing illustration style with the green screen footage. “We wanted to give it all a somewhat old-school stop-motion feel, and also really wanted the illustrations of the band and the lead characters to work hard in creating the overall look of the video. It meant creating hundreds of illustrations on an extremely tight deadline. It was then all put together using Photoshop and After Effects.”
Williams describes the biggest challenge as creating the illustrations for the animated sequences. “The slightly lower frame rate of the stop-motion style made the workload a little lighter in that eight illustrations per second were needed, as opposed to 24. It meant working very methodically in creating the line drawings separately, re-doing them in colour (B/W), and then compositing and animating them in the compositions. This had to be done for every shot of every scene,” explains Williams.
“Filming the fighting and surfing scenes with the band was fun. It was amazing how hey effortlessly brought their own unique style and moves to the action, whether it was using martial arts moves on aliens or using skateboards to simulate the hoverboard chase through outer space,” says Williams.
WONDERboom guitarist Martin Schofield says “Making a good video on no budget, with one main man, we laughed and laughed at ourselves trying to act and Williams being an international martial arts champ had us doing flying kicks, punches and generally being violent with each other, which we don’t normally do.”
The new album is due for release by Sheer Music in October. The video was released on 13 July 2016.
