Channel Frederator Blog

Animator/director Joel Trussell graces us with more of his music video magic in Kid 606’s “The Illness”. Here he talks about the video’s concept, music, and what advice he’d give to his younger self.

Channel Frederator: How did you develop the concept for this music video?

Joel Trussell: Style-wise, I had recently worked on a project for Napster under the direction of design genius Geoff McFetridge. He was using a minimal style that concentrated on bold design and limited color palette that allowed the animation to stay economical but the visuals to stay fresh and engaging. Considering my limitations for this video (budget and time-wise) I thought I’d give a stab to a similar approach.

Concept-wise I borrowed pretty heavily from Indiana Jones, didn’t I? Using that as a foundation I tried to form a little loose narrative around audio cues I was drawn to in the track and keep the conflict escalating.

CF: Is there a particular genre of music that you find easier to animate?

JT: Any genre seems to come with a different set of problems, but instrumental tracks are nice because you can create something without the worry of addressing the lyrics.

CF: If you could create a music video to any song, which song would you use?

JT: That’s a tough question. One with a big budget maybe, heh. Anything from Beck would be pretty amazing.

CF: Is there anything you’d like to discuss? I’m open to suggestions.

JT: Ha… I don’t know if it’s useful, but I recently answered this question for a student in England:

“Say you could go back in time and give yourself at bit of worldly advice about work, what would you say?”

This is a short list (I needed a good talking to in my twenties)

-Find as many truthfully unbiased opinions of your art as you can.
-Embrace criticism, but remember criticism from a high school student and criticism from a working artist have different worth.
-Self evaluate as much as possible and be realistic.
-Be relentless in editing your own work. (i.e. Never show the truly lame stuff… deep right?)
-Compare your work to the people you most admire.
-Don’t desire to be an exact copy of the people you admire. Instead find out what the people you admire want to be exactly like and pursue that.
-Put all your investments into hi-tech stocks during the mid-1990’s then pull them out in the year 2000.

Thank you, Joels - past and present!

You can check out Joel’s music video Kid 606 “The Illness” right here on Channel Frederator!

-Bailee DesRocher