The Decemberists perform their animated rock opera at Royce Hall in Los Angeles.

On Monday, the Portland-based rock The Decemberists band performed their new concept album-cum-rock opera The Hazards of Love in its entirety at a special, one-off show at Royce Hall on the UCLA campus in Los Angeles. To accompany the music, the band commissioned a free-flowing, abstract animated concert film based on the record’s dark primeval themes.

Inspired by English singer Anne Briggs’ 1966 EP of the same name, The Hazards of Love tells a murderous folktale about a woman named Margaret, her shape-shifting lover, a forest queen and a rake. When they had finished recording the album, The Decemberists decided to perform their rock opera in its entirety after watching it played through a music visualizer.

“This album is the apotheosis of an obsession with British folk songs,” says The Decemberists frontman Colin Meloy. “It grew into the idea of creating a suite of songs based on old folk songs: building a narrative, piecing together disparate motifs, developing actual protagonists.”

In keeping with the album’s conceptual psychedelic mood, the band wanted to create an animated film that eschewed literal interpretation of the lyrics and asked Flux’s Jonathan Wells to curate visuals for a performance.

“It’s a rock record - you’re supposed to fill in the blanks a little,” says Meloy. “There should be stuff that’s more abstract and left to interpretation. So you can come to it without knowing the narrative, or you can pull out the lyric sheet and try pull it all together.”

Wells approached New York-based animation company Hornet to create an hour-long animated film synched to The Hazards of Love’s 17 tracks. The resulting film, Here Come The Waves, incorporates both animated and live action visuals that accentuate the album’s foreboding atmospherics.

Hornet directors Peter Sluszka, Guilherme Marcondes, Santa Maria and London-based independent illustrator/director Julia Pott divided the project in four, representing the four sides of the vinyl album that correspond with the four seasons. Though the directors worked independently, they collaborated on transitional sequences between each ‘side’.

Production started in August and lasted seven weeks - a tight turnaround for a company used to spending months producing 30-second spots.

“The turnaround time was challenging as we had to create 15 minutes worth of animation per director that had to uphold a certain amount of narrative and connection to the tracks,” says producer Hana Shimizu. “If not for the band and integrity of the project and the overall approach, it’s not something we’re typically eager to do.”

As companies like Hornet are asked to produce more longer format work, Shimizu says projects such as Here Come The Waves serve to remind directors it’s possible to further their craft despite restrictive time and money constraints.

“We have to continue to deliver good quality work and evolve stylistically. Not to the needs of the market but to our needs as craftsmen,” she says. “Sometimes I think it’s hard for directors and companies to remember that. These projects are a great reminder to bring us back to those goals and aspirations.”

The full-length version of Here Come The Waves will be released on iTunes on December 1, but you can see excerpts from the film in the Screening Room. For more insight into the film’s four parts, Boards asked Peter Sluszka, Julia Pott, Guilherme Macondes and Santa Maria to explain how they interpreted the music.

Peter Sluszka

“Listening to The Hazards of Love, an animist theme becomes apparent very early on in the narrative. I wanted to explore this aspect of the story and how it related to the mysterious, forest environment, which is why I focused on vegetation and organic elements, shooting them as if they were animated by the same spirits driving the plot and protagonists.

“Musically, ‘The Prelude’ is stark and minimal, transitioning to a fuller second track that evokes a sense of travel and discovery. Visually, the film mirrors this progression, starting with a void as seeds spiral hypnotically, resolving in a dense, overgrown forest that helps establish an ambience and mood for all the narrative to come.

“The third and fourth tracks continue in this vein, with animated leaves, trees, mushrooms, and flowers synched to the music in an abstract interplay with the plot and characters. All four tracks from the first side combine high-speed footage shot on the Phantom camera with stop-motion animation, photographed largely on a multi-plane set-up.”

Julia Pott

“The season that I was assigned was summer. I tried to use imagery that I associated with summer but without being overtly bright and warm. By setting most of the film at night I could use summery imagery whilst maintaining a sinister edge. When working on more commercial projects you’re often required to squeeze a lot of information into a very short amount of time. It’s been great to work on a project in which there is opportunity to let the work breathe. It’s also a rare chance to work alongside other filmmakers to be part of a bigger picture.

“Some of the imagery was based on diagrams and drawings found in science text books. I also borrowed from old nature magazines and journals to create a collaged background to set off the hand-drawn animation. I wanted to make each scene like a moving illustration. I looked at the naive style that is currently popular in contemporary illustration. I have a whole bunch of National Geographics from the ’80s which I used as a reference for the animal characters.

Guilherme Marcondes

“The unifying theme for the project as a whole was ‘the woods’. Somehow we all did something involving trees, forests etc. To divide each director’s segment we created quick, graphical transitions representing the four seasons. My segment, for instance, was connected to the previous by autumnal falling leaves and to the following one by a shower of snowflakes.

“I developed my segment along with artist Andrezza Valentin. We wanted to do something that would look like an environment for the band to perform in front of. It should be an animated set-design that would hopefully transport the audience into that world, providing a special context for the songs to be performed.

“We didn’t do a literal interpretation of the lyrics - the idea was to enhance the overall mood of the music. Our sequence of songs was the darkest in the album (which I liked very much) so we decided to go for some eerie symbolism combined with more abstract psychedelic moments. There were several elements representing the passing of time like the sun, the moon, an eclipse, ruins and human bones.

“I used a high-speed Phantom camera to shoot some elements. Other elements were illustrations or photographs. Everything was composed later in After Effects.”

Santa Maria

“After we listened to the album and heard the lyrics a few times, we decided that we should shoot video. We thought of something that could feel eerie and a little unnerving as well as magical and nostalgic. So we decided to literally go into the forest with a camera, a bright light and a fog machine. In the end it was more or less an experiment, along with an abstract story about shooting stars.

“The band didn’t want to dwell on the lyrics so much so we decided to make a piece based on the feeling of the music. Overall the music flows very naturally and is a strange mix of beauty and sadness. We tried our best to match that with melancholy imagery.

“Techniques: long exposure photography (light streaks and shallow depth of field), still forest scenes, collage of images.”

Check out photos from The Decemberists performance of Here Come The Waves at Royce Hall on October 19 below.

www.hornetinc.com
http://juliapott.blogspot.com
www.flux.net