This is a conversation with Rebecca Huston, the Animator and Director of the music video for the song “Panic Pilgrim, Quick Grab Your Suitcase” by the band An American Chinese.
“I just loved this song so much, I told Mitch and Mark (songwriters/guitarists), we should make a video! And that was the start of a long road through Photoshop designing and Adobe After Effects tutorials. We had fancy ideas but had never made any film/video before. But with lots of time and trial and error, we figured it all out!”
Tell me about the creative process you confronted in the making of this video:
“The lyrics and the whole song have this eerie, end of the world vibe to it, hence the storyline. So building the virtual house was the most fun. We designed the paintings on the walls, (there is one of Mitch dressed as an Indian shaking the hand of an Astronaut), the egg lamps, the music box on the desk with two women on the beach and a fighter plane buzzing overhead, and there is the eclipse clock”…
How did you use these programs to animate this video?
“It was cool how intuitive Adobe After Effects is. There were parent layers and children layers and then children’s children… So for example: the layer that was the living room space was a parent of the couch, organ, desk, and TV, etc. And the egg lamp on the desk with the animate of yolk dripping down its side was a child of the desk. Everything moves in relation to each other. Yippy! Adobe After Effect is mostly used to do touch up work and rolling the credits at the end of a film but it really can be used to do it all. By the time we were done there were 476 layers in the After Effects file. The only thing I needed Premiere for was to capture the chroma key footage. That is… all the band members moving about… and Lexter my cat.”
Who are the characters in the video and how did you film the chroma key footage?
“I (Becca, bassist) was Pilgrim Bonnie seen knitting the cat. Mitch was Bonson Wicker, the guy packing the suitcase. Mark was two different news reporters we like to call, Adam Checkitz and Jackman O’hair. And Joy (key’s/ percussion) was Alison Wonderland. Boy was it a fun task figuring out the chroma key! The giant piece of teal colored fabric I bought in fabric row worked great and the 9 hot-as-shit clamp lamps worked adequately. We were able to manage the cat knitting shots in my bedroom and Marks reporting shots in the backyard. But capturing Mitch walking around the “house” was the challenge. It took about 4 different locations before we got some good shots at his parent’s house in Albuquerque. The trick was hanging the teal screen in the garage and using late day natural light. But we were running against time, cuz that sun was going down and we had only one day to do it. Classic, right?”
“Hope you enjoy our little monster brainchild, ‘Panic Pilgrim, Quick Grab Your Suitcase’".
To hear more music from An American Chinese and learn more about this 7-piece band check them out at:
