The Heavy – Can’t Play Dead from Jason Willis on Vimeo.
After seeing the “Halloween” stop motion short that I shot on my iPhone, British rock & soul band The Heavy hired me to direct a full-blown stop motion video for their song “Can’t Play Dead”, the lead-off track on their album The Glorious Dead.
The song’s ghoulish subject matter and creepy aural vibe suggested a kind of B-Movie storyline to me, so I scripted up a series of scenes juxtaposing a slew of spooky goings-on featuring the main female character, while the band hangs out in the underworld banging out the tune. This video was a tremendously good time to make.
Some articles and press:
• Entertainment Weekly
• FearNet
• Flux Magazine
• Bloody Disgusting
Special thanks to Julian Clark Studios for their fantastic armatures.
Just for good measure, here’s a gallery mixing a few “behind the scenes” stills in with production shots from most of the video setups.
If you click through to the complete Flickr set you’ll find that I tried to spell out as many of the steps and resources in the text as I could, just in case anyone reading this is itching to give stop motion animation a shot. Do it!
In fact while I’m at it, let me just take special care to mention the fantastic “Animasapien XL” armatures that I used from Julian Clarke Studios, and the amazingly informative puppet-making “how-to” blueprint that Nick Hilligoss outlines in his YouTube video tutorials “Making Latex Build-Up Puppet Head” and “Make a Buildup Puppet”. Great, great stuff.
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Official version on YouTube: