The plot

They meet at a party in a modern apartment. She doesn’t notice that he has thrown a mysterious red pill into her drink, so she travels through surrealist worlds of color and mysteries. When she awakes, she’s naked and he has taken pictures of her. That’s why she has to teach him a lesson on how to treat a lady…

The film

 

The Idea

“This Is Not A Horse” is a music video for a good friend of mine, DJ jazz.K.lipa. I had worked for him before, designing three of his album covers. When I listened to the song the first time, I knew that I had to make a video. The song itself but mostly MC Soom T’s voice were inducing all kinds of strange images in my head – even stranger than the usual ones, if that is possible.
The first idea was to fly across an animated comic page. I drew a sketchy storyboard which contained a lot of film noir elements from the 40s and 50s: diamonds, shooting girls, car chases and so on. The lyrics of the song should appear in the appropriate places.
The only problem was that I didn’t understand the lyrics. To my mind, some of the things MC Soom T sings cannot (and maybe shoud not) be decoded. As the translation was hard for a German, I asked a British friend of mine whose only response was that it is all about cats in ancient boxes who are lactose intolerant, that breastfeeding is best and women should be left unspoken. Got it? Well, I’m still trying to find someone to make sense of it all.

Josh Agle, a.k.a. Shag

Without having a real plan about what the video should be like visually, I discovered Adobe Illustrator. The program offers a few free Tiki style character templates that look exactly like Josh Agle’s art, better known as SHAG. I visited his website and found the inspiration for the film. Each of his pictures throws the character into a story that is colorful on the outside but very dark on the inside.

Workflow

A lot of details can be seen in the film. There are dancers in a room with a sound system, moving to the beat of the song. There are camera moves, statues whose eyes glow rhythmically and particles.
I created about 70 different images, backgrounds, characters and assets in Adobe Illustrator, which means that I drew sketches, scanned them and retraced them as vector graphics. I distributed all the parts that should be animated onto separate layers, e.g. one layer for a hand, one for the forearm and so on.

Then I exported the files to After Effects. To explain it in simple words: You animate a character layer by layer, you put that animated character onto other layers which you animate. Then you include a virtual camera which also has to be animated and after many hours of work you’ve got two seconds of animation and a serious marriage problem.
It took about three months to make that two-minute movie. Creativity, after all, is characterized by 10 per cent inspiration and 90 per cent transpiration.

Let me give it to you raw!