Making Fred Everything & TeuTeu Move

There’s no AI used in this and please note the copyright symbol.

Needs sound.

Creating The Art & Making It Move For Arrêt Infini

I didn’t realise I could make motion graphics until earlier this year. I was designing and painting 12 inch covers for Winding Road records and they were using AI generated videos which I could see were doing things with my art that I could do better if I looked into and worked at. So, I sat down with Clip Studio Paint (it has animation capabilities and I’d already experimented with it and gotten the gist) and fired up the art I’d done for the label and started to make it move.

The art I’d painted was a parrot in a modern psychedelic style, which is a style I love and a feel that fits well with deep house records (deep house can be very jazz-inflected and the release was Fred Everything and TeuTeu’s work and they’re both accomplished jazz musicians. Jazz has a great history of psychedelic and surreal art: I was really pleased to do it too, because I love jazz music, I love 70’s album covers and I love Fred Everything’s music). I love Winding Road too (I’ve been buying their records since they began) – and I particularly like the look of their initial graphic design (put together by the great John Burgerman). You can see that I’m a fan of everybody involved on an artistic level so this project really was a treat for me; it was a genuine honour to move the look of the label forward.

I hadn’t realised that I was going to be animating the art I’d made. The shapes and the shadows and the textures were designed to give the impression of movement, but not to actually move. So, there was a challenge there: how to make something that was made to look as if it was capable of movement, but didn’t move, actually move – and still keep the jazzy, psychedelic vibe? The answer was to pare back the shadows and lean into the abstract shapes that I’d used for the bird and the jungle and to take them and have them grow and turn into an infinity of new things (Arrêt Infini means “infinite stop” in English, which you can understand as an infinite amount of stops; an unending number of finishes – a WILD thing to think about – or, as a request to the infinite to cease… in the end I went with the second interpretation because it implied that infinity was overwhelming; and I think it is overwhelming and therefore to me it was the most interesting thing to try to get at).

So I had the shapes grow and multiply into an infinity of new forms…

Go & Have A Listen

Anyway, I hope you like it. I cut the growing and multiplying new forms with shots of TeuTeu and Fred themselves and timed some of the motion to coincide with the drums and the synth stabs. I did three animations in the end.

..And did I mention that Winding Road records is run by the Nottingham deep house act, Schmoov!? Well, I love their work too and you should go and have a listen to what Fred, TeuTeu, Schmoov! and Winding Road have made.

Go and have a listen to what Winding Road do – it’s proper house music.

Like what I’ve done here and interested in seeing what I can do for you? You can contact me here, on the Contact page.