Animated chakras, life at its core… please tell us how your narrative evolved.

I have loved Iron and Wine since Sam Beam’s first album The Creek Drank the Cradle, so creating a music video to his music was a dream project. He was so fantastic to work with and gave me complete freedom to have my ideas run wild and make his song into a visual world.

When brainstorming ideas for possible narratives and visual interpretations of the song I was drawn to a particular lyric. “Deep inside the heart of this crazy mess I’m only calm when I get lost within your wilderness.” This is what sparked my idea.

Joy is a song about love and taking a moment to realize how someone can vastly change how you perceive yourself and the world around you. My goal for this video was to make the viewer feel this sense of joy, discovery and appreciation by following the organic flow of the song as the landscape changes through bursts of color, growth and transformation. Through his eyes we see how the woman Sam sings about changes his world by catching glimpses of her within the different plants, rocks, trees and objects that occupy the scenery/himself. In the end we see that he is full of color and vibrancy.

An easy-going production then?

The video is a mixed media piece. It’s composed of a blend of rotoscope watercolor animations and stop-motion. I hand made every piece in the landscape from found objects, paper, clay and various materials, and then projected her image into the set pieces. Each scene was shot frame by frame with Dragon in my studio space in my apartment. It was nice rolling out of bed and ready for work!

What have you been up to since 1.4 featured your Bounce Bounce video?

Since my last music video for “Bounce Bounce” I took some time to do some different things. I took a trip to Europe for a month last summer, which was very inspiring. I took a break from directing and worked as a fabricator and animator on a few commercials for Cadbury, Mcdonalds and Toyota. I taught the Intermediate Stop-Motion Animation class at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in Fall 12′. I really enjoyed teaching. I have also guest lectured at MICA. Iron and Wine contacted me to make the video and I also just came up with an idea for a new short film, so I am starting to develop the idea and will try to get funding when my idea is clear.