WAAX are a band of punk-as-rock, hectic kids. Their track “Wisdom Teeth” had been creeping up on Triple J and Unearthed for a couple of months, and needed a quick clip that would match the intensity of their sound and live presence.
Wisdom Teeth has such an evocative then/now sound. So I wanted to create a clip which feels like a 90s music video, but uses modern gear like robotic camera control and LED screens. Marie (lead singer) is a graphic designer. I loved her “WAAX” logo and album art and asked her to come up with some iconography and a colour scheme which I animated to create a wall of visuals. I tried to forget all of my modern trickery and use older animation techniques to keep the feel as “early computer graphics” as possible.
For robotic camera programming, usually you aim for a smooth, human look. I thought that if that kind of gear was available in the 90s it would be pretty unsophisticated, so I had the camera whipping around in jerky, high-speed movements. We only had budget for 4x2m worth of LED screens, so for the shoot we put them in different locations around the space and ran the performance and robot moves over and over for each location. In all we shot about 150 takes with the song split into 5 different sections.
The edit needed to be intensely detailed and hyperactive to match the song’s blistering energy and duration, so I simultaneously cut and composted in After Effects (Visual Effects software). That is a terrible idea that nobody should do ever, but it forced me to think about the VFX of each transition as it was cut. Prohibitively time-consuming, but it gave us a pretty unique result!
Credits:
Director / Motion Control / Visuals Animation / Editor / Post-production: Jaymis
Graphic Design: Marie DeVita
LED Screens: Ash Neuendorf / High Impact Lighting
Label: Ben Preece / Mucho Bravado
Thanks:
Motion Control / Camera Gear: Daniel Graetz / Graetzmedia
Venue: Jugglers Art Space