Alex Turvey channels Fred Penner for Cheatahs
If you can count yourself among the toque-wearing throngs of ’80s children in Canada, you’ll surely remember children’s TV host Fred Penner of the eponymous Fred Penner’s Place. If not, then you missed out on the multi-instrumentalist’s array of colorful jumpers that would make Bill Cosby jealous and his cool woodland pad, accessible via secret log entrance.
Penner did get to one musician though, Nathan Ernest Hewitt of UK indie outfit Cheatahs. As a boy growing up in Edmonton, Canada, Hewitt decided to become a musician after seeing Penner lay down what we can only imagine was a mean guitar and jaw harp set. He would later revisit his childhood hero via his new video “Warrior” directed by Strange Beast’s Alex Turvey.
“My first idea [for the video] was based on horrific, fantasy animal art that you get on t-shirts: wolves and moons, that kind of really horrible, airbrushed thing you see,” says Turvey. “We started talking and Nathan said, ‘Actually I used to do animal illustrations when I was a child.’ He showed me an illustration of a lion that he had framed in his house. And I was like, ‘Wouldn’t it be amazing if we took it in this direction - you surrounded by all your illustrations?”
The first obstacle: how does Nathan arrive in this world populated by his childhood creations? The solution: Penner.
Alex's cat perches atop the infamous log.
“Nathan showed me the [Fred Penner's Place] intro on YouTube, and I thought, this is perfect! He’ll crawl through a log. We had the idea straight away after a half hour chat and everything just naturally fell into place,” explains Turvey. “Nathan contacted his mother and got her to send the old illustrations he did when he was 7 at this trailer park in Edmonton. This crazy woman taught him to draw in this really weird way. She would get him to draw animals from National Geographic and other wildlife photography. We had all these strange creatures - the lion looks a little bit like a man, it has a human nose and it looks like it could be a hippie! We got these images and I went away and made an animatic.”
After contacting Mark Conell and Omar Lado from UK-based 3D design studio MADE, who volunteered their time, the team got to work building the set in Turvey’s apartment over a smoldering two days during Britain’s July heat wave. The illustrations were projected onto medium-density fiberboard, which allowed Hewitt to trace each one - some reaching heights of 8 feet - before MADE cut them out and paneled them together.
“Nathan recreated all of the animal illustrations. My policy is that I didn’t want to draw any of them with him because I felt like it wouldn’t be true to the project - it was about him recreating it,” says Turvey. “I drew trees, bushes, bits and bobs - the new illustrations we made up for the environment - but the animals were all done by Nathan, and he kept it true to his original style. I think he re-experienced the whole process of when he was a child drawing them. He was a little emotional, because he began remembering reasons why the drawings were like they were. [For example], in front of the monkey, there’s this big bush in front of his hand, but he’s on a tree so it didn’t make any sense. Nathan said he did that because he didn’t know how to draw monkey hands when he was a child. He was experiencing all these moments where he couldn’t draw things. He put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into it which was good.”
Warriors, all of them: the team.
During the shoot, Turvey corralled eight team members to act as puppeteers, manipulating the animals’ movable eyes and heads, while stylist Laura Clayton was on hand to sew Hewitt’s Penner-inspired lion jumper. After the shoot, Turvey handled all post duties with free Flame assistance from La Pac, Paris.
Overall, Turvey said it was a straightforward albeit labor-intensive shoot and he plans to collaborate with Cheatahs again for a second promo, which will be based on an old comic book series, called Conquer, that Hewitt and his brother created and illustrated characters for. Hopefully, when it comes time to shoot the second promo, the team won’t run into the only snag that almost plagued “Warriors”: a few well-meaning pilferers, who almost made off with the set.
“We [stashed] a lot of the animals and environment props outside near the trash area,” explains Turvey. “We put them there and took a break. As we were coming back home, we saw these people had stolen the animals and were going up the road with them. One girl had a rabbit under her arm, this guy had the bushes and the grass. I was like, ‘Whoa, what are you doing!’ I was freaking out because I was seeing all of our hard work stolen from us. But we got them back and let them keep one thing that we didn’t like.”
Nathan decked out in his lion jumper. Photo: Laura Clayton
Watch the “Making of ” video for more behind-the-scenes insights, here.
Photos: Nathan Jenkins
