Pages

Saturday, September 3, 2011

This week’s post is a little late, but there is good reason for it. You see, I became a zombie.


A few years ago, the Kenyan music industry was revolutionized by pioneer local artists like Nameless and E-Sir. Urban Kenyan youth finally began to listen to locally made music as much as they did foreign music, and everybody was pleased. Back then, all you needed to make a Kenyan music video was a camera and some friends- maybe a creative director. Very few artists invested ample time and money into their videos, and there wasn’t much cause for it anyway. Mizizi and The Beat played the music videos, and helped to push the Kenyan music industry forward. We loved seeing those videos, and didn’t mind that they were considered inadequate by international standards.


Today, however, the bar has been raised. It has been raised way up high, and artists need to put more thought, effort and money into their videos to get them played on TV. When I began to work on my first music video, I had no idea that I would eventually turn into a zombie. I learned, however, that this was inevitable after staying up all night last night working on the final touches of the video and trying to incorporate the advice that I got from pre-screenings. I was working for 15 straight hours, and by 7am I felt like a mass of rubbery meat with globs of sponge for eyes (DISCLAIMER: This is a common side effect of working on stop motion videos on a mini laptop 1GB RAM while eating liver and drinking lime juice)


Nonetheless, it was worth it. After sleepless nights, many prayers and a world of growth, Pepe Haze & Steph McKee finally have a music video for their amazing song, Rain On My Lips- and I hereby claim bragging rights for the first fully puppet-animated stop motion music video in the Kenyan urban music scene! I have well acknowledged that Just A Band stole a bit of my thunder by releasing their amazing animated music videos before mine, but that’s all OK ;) Just A Band came with a 2D animated video (Iwinyo Piny) and a sock-puppet video (Hey!) and an amazing 2D animation of stick-figures (Highway), but I’m coming with a full traditional stop-motion puppet animation piece (Rain On My Lips), and that's a first! (If it's not then someone please tell me which other such music videos exist- so that I can seek out the video producers, zap them with my carbon-destabilizer secret weapon and send them into 2037 where they will spend their days mentoring futuristic afro-techno musicians on the forgotten art of melodic bottle-blowing)



I get a lot of questions about what exactly stop-motion animation is, so I will publish an account of the production process of the video soon. For now- special thanks to Pepe Haze and Steph McKee for making an amazing song, and for having me make the music video for it. 

Official release date for the music video is tomorrow, 4th September 2011 (Happy Birthday Pepe!)- it will be on YouTube and Vimeo at midnight tonight, so come through and check out this fully stop-mo local music video! This is the lyrics video; listen to the song as you wait for the official music video...


1 comment:

  1. Niaje Daniel, yeaa! There was also a show long time on I think STV ama sijui channel gani ya kitambombo, called Warehouse! Was trying to remember the name of the show as I wrote this but I've only remembered it now :)

    ReplyDelete