drum roll…..THE NEW STOP-MOTION VIDEO for “WANT IT BACK” is UP.

July 09, 2012

HOLA COMRADES

greetings from italy, where i’ve come from boston to do a day of press – heading to paris tomorrow to do same. i will have been in europe for 48 hours, then i’m hitting san fran and LA for the kickstarter art & rock shows.

there is GRAND NEWS to share with you – our first official video is UP UP UP UP UP UP UP.

this was the one you may remember me tweeting pictures from when we were still in melbourne making the record back in march.
kim boekbinder’s boyfriend, jim batt, had made a ninja video with me on the “amanda palmer goes down under tour.” we were in a bizarre town called newcastle, kim was opening, jim was there to support, and the dude had a camera and wasn’t afraid to chase me around early one morning in the abandoned hotel we’d just crashed in the night before where pigeons pooped on our heads. the budget was zero, and the result he edited together was the beautiful video for “in my mind.” this time, we made a REAL video. the budget was still relatively teeny and we worked with our wits, but what the dude is capable of is beyond mind-blowing. i knew he was good at stop-motion because i’d been watching him plugging away at kim’s kickstarter’ed “organ donor’s march” video….

….we met at the studio in melbourne a few times, tried to hash out a plan, and were off. the idea to make a video in the first place sprouted out of the fact that i was living above a costume shop, and i thought it would be the perfect place to run amok. so the original treatment was actually for the song “melody dean” (which you guys haven’t heard yet). jim knocked together a treatment, based on my idea that we could grab every single one of our melbourne friends and have a cosmic dress-up party/orgy.

it was a week or so to go til our proposed shoot dates, which were right at the tail end of recording the album, when jim decided that shooting in rose chong, the costume shop, wasn’t going to actually look as awesome as i was picturing it in my head.

i got cold feet and wasn’t really feeling the treatment, and i suggested we maybe try to do something simpler. something stop motion? jim went to bed and had a think. the next day we sent me a treatment for “want it back.” i said: let’s do it.

he scrambled to find the space and the artist (curran, who was a patient brush-wielding GOD), and i showed up for three days straight, getting drawn on.
there were a few moments where the entire crew fell asleep on the floor waiting for the slllllllooooooowwww process to come to a painful end.

anthony cleave helped with a lot of stuff and did the makeup – some nights he had to jet and i’d just DIY it. the entire crew was, at maximum, about 4 or 5 people. curran’s girlfriend came in one day and helped out (she’s the cute one with the pink hair in the photos below).

each frame that you see took at least a few minutes to photograph….multiplied by thousands.

jherek had to jet, so we created a scene for him that didn’t require the whole band to be there, and we squeezed in the scene with michael and chad before they had to fly home.
jim had mapped out a pretty specific plan for the shots, but we deviated and improvised a LOT – as ideas came to me and as we ran out of time, we kept changing the path of the ink.
all the graffiti on the walls was done after we left town in march – right in melbourne (in/around brunswick street) – which is very likely not far from the alley where jim & i shot the now-infamous kickstarter video.

some things to watch out for:

– the typo and carat in the text weren’t planned. curran fucked up. i love the way it looks.

– curran and jherek both had greaser/pompadour hairstyles. i wasn’t there, but according to jherek, curran apologized profusely for the moment where they messed up his hair. brothers.

– the candy bar (cherry ripe) is SUPER australian. it tasted BAD. sort of marshy-chocy-cherry-icky. still way better than vegemite.

– jim asked me to shave my legs. i did it without blinking.

– the book that chad is holding is not an accident.

and spread the link, spread the link, spread the link:http://youtu.be/cZCadqQY-Lw

XXXX
afp

(all photos by Kat Weir unless obviously by me i.e. i’m holding the camera…)

the space: