Directed by Alasdair & Jock
Produced by Richard Barnett
Production Company Trunk Animation
Visit Trunk here for more details and behind the scenes.
As with all their projects, Alasdair + Jock went into overdrive on the research and development, finding the backstories of individual featured images, where they were from, and what was going on at the time. To note any specific ideas would be to give away the joy of the hunt, but needless to say each sequence holds a back story, and a little bit of Beatles history, so look out!
The team used a plethora of techniques to bring the piece alive, including stop motion, live action, hand drawn 2D on paper, 3D modelling, scratch film, rostrum cut out replacements, pixilation and hand painted artworking. With Jock Mooney’s artistic eye heading up the artworking, and Layla Atkinson heading up the printing, the pre-production on the project was intense. In order to achieve the final look, thousands of photographs from archive sources were edited, printed out, numbered, and either painted on, scratched, or generally man handled, before being shot under a motion control camera. As the video contained so many different techniques there was never a dull moment, from building sets that represented Richard Hamilton’s studio to carefully cutting out thousands of photos including some particularly scissor tricky images of Ringo Starr, who at the time sported a fabulously shaggy hairstyle. On most projects you have perhaps two or three challenging shots, but with there being so many hand crafted techniques, and by pushing the motion control rig to the limit, nothing was easy. The shooting of this project was a battle between creative desire and technical limitations. However, with such an amazing camera team, headed by DOP Pete Ellmore, although there were some late nights, the team captured everything they needed and more. Stitching all the shot footage together was always going to be a reasonable battle, but with such beautiful source imagery, and with expert planning and the masterful hand of Alasdair Brotherston in the compositing seat, it all came together seamlessly.
