Music video "Like Battling The Hydra"
Visual development, illustration and motion design for the Los Angeles based band Dark Rooms.
Description
Dark Room's song "Like Battling The Hydra" is about former U.S. supreme court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's famous dissent from 2013 which the lyrics recite.
The idea was to create an evolving painting that ends with anonymous and equal humans waiting in lines
to vote for a common brighter goal or future and very vaguely references the U.S. flag
while bringing in the instruments and musical accentuations visually.
Staying on the verge of painting spatially with shadow and light in mind and
purely abstract and graphically so everyone can read their own meaning into it without being too literal.
Services
Concept
Storyboarding
Illustration
Hand lettering
Animation
Compositing
Final music video
Trailer
Paintings in progress
Animatic
The retraction of the first video
Just before the anticipated release of the finished first music video, Dark Rooms and I have decided not to publish it. Out of nowhere, newly surfaced statements by Ginsburg
with more than questionable political and ethical believes made the band and myself feel quite uncomfortable about getting this music video out there,
possibly sending wrong signals of conceptions we did not want to defend.
The music video is such a clear tribute to years of relentless role-modelling and
fighting for equality and human rights putting Ginsburg utterly in its center. All of a sudden, the video felt misplaced, confusing, disappointing and sorely
bitter.
The song is, however, about Ginsburg's dissent. About the Voting Rights Act. A political achievement that she defended in 2013.
So we decided to create a new video instead. A video that is less about her and more about it.
Below you'll find the retracted video, shown here as part of this project and its process.
Not used music video
The video showed an evolution, portraits of Ginsburg from young to old, from black and white to color, from an old 4:3 TV format to a cinematic ratio in a none distracting manner, staying with the hand-lettered lyrics and paintings.
Storyboards
Color studies and palettes
Paintings in progress
