Artist Research - Elliot Dear

Elliot Dear

Elliot Dear is a British animator who is most recently famous for his work on the 2013 John Lewis advert and also for creating music videos for Jon Hopkins & King Creosote.

Bubble - Music Video for King Creosote & Jon Hopkins

This music video is mainly shot using various camera techniques and a model environment with 2D animated features added after the original footage is shot. Once these layers have been combined, effects to add snow and to make the footage look aged are overlaid ontop of the footage.

The animation itself appears aged and none of the models look recent, for instance great care has been taken in making the stranded car look aged and the boat itself looks worn and well used. To accommodate the amount of detail needed in this animation, the models themselves are quite large.

Rather than rotating the camera (which could appear jerky and a good rig would be quite expensive) the model set itself was placed on a board and was rotated. The combination of this with the overlaid particle effects gives the impression that the camera is moving through fog or snow without having to program complex reactions to the camera's position. 

For the underwater sections where the dog moves through the reflections, the only which had to be done was overlay effects to darken or distort the image slightly and reflect the footage taken of the models from before. 

As for the light "bubbles" towards the end of the videos, Elliot Dear created plastic orbs with lights inside and floated them in water. After recording this, he must have reflected the recording and edited out all of the wires which could have ruined the illusion. Once these parts were filmed, I imagine all shots were combined and adjusted in a movie editing software leaving it ready for the 2D animation with alpha channels to be overlaid. 

The animation progresses relatively slowly, helping create a sense of wonder and familiarity with the scene and how the dog moves in between the underwater and surface worlds. As there is no sound in the animation, it is entirely dependant on the pace of the song and when the stringed instrument is introduced towards the end of the song, the light bubbles appear helping bring the animation to a climax and then finish. 

I think that the concept of the animation is based mainly on the interaction between the dog and its reflection perhaps representing the relationship described in the lyrics of the song and how both dog's will constantly be there for each other in a more literal than emotional sense. The general aesthetic of the animation could have be created due to the strong Scottish accent that King Creosote has and that the model village created is reminiscent of a small Scottish fishing village.