Julio Bashmore's Peppermint

Last month I got my first job in animation working on a music video for Julio Bashmore. The song is called Peppermint and was directed by Noah Harris for Colonel Blimp & Blinkink and shot at Prodigious Studios who also did most of the post production. I got to work with some amazing people and was incredibly nervous having looked up the rest of the team online before starting, I was one of four animators and did some shots together some with all of us involved and I got given some shots to do on my own.

It was a two week shoot with days starting around 7/8am and usually ending at about 2am luckily and also strangely time flies when you’re animating and I enjoyed every second of it. The shoot was my first time using Dragonframe as I used Stop Motion Pro for my graduate film Marionette but it was a very similar program and I picked it up quite fast. As the animation was all set to music there were some very keys moves that had to happen on certain frames so a lot of planning and timing went into the animation and we had elaborate reference videos taken from Noah’s after effect files to help us keep everything happening on time. The new thing for me about Peppermint was walking onto a lit and camera ready set and just getting ready to animate as with Marionette we did all of the lighting and camera work ourselves.

We also got awesome food delivered to the animation rooms which was amazing. Some of the elements in the film were 3D printed another new element that I had not worked with before so some background elements had 12 or 24 frame cycles that had been printed out and needed to be changed at the right times and beats with the song. The female face in the film also had replaceable mouths that I had to animate on numerous occasions with Dragonframe synced to the audio and the reference video helping get the right mouths into the right frames. Quite a few of the shots involved moving cameras as well, the shoot had a volo motion control camera that synced up to Dragonframe and moved with each frame that was set up before shot. We also had a couple of shots with manual tracks on where we just had to wind a lever to move the camera a very small amount each frame.
 

Overall the shoot was loads of fun and a massive learning curve for myself, but went really well and hopefully leads onto more work. The finished video looks amazing check it out below.