The Crunchy Frog Blog | "Le Beats on Fire" & "Pre-emptive Stroke" vs. time!!!

"Le Beats on Fire" & "Pre-emptive Stroke" vs. time!!!

by crunchy.dk 15. September 2004 11:18

This is a tale of making the most dubious project.

Mission: make a fully animated video in just one week; record the project and in that way make another video to go be released before the video that was the initial primary mission is released. Confused? Looks like a walk in the park? Too easy? Then let this photo journal clear up some of the perplexity of this project.

We (epo-555 and Crunchy Frog) needed a video… in fact, we needed two videos, and we needed them NOW!!!

Jan Oksbøl Callesen had already impressed us all with the incredible artwork to the epo-555s album (check it out at the epo-e-card). So, it was not an obvious choice to invite him and his friend Martin de Thurah to present us with a treatment for a video – it seemed almost natural!

epo-555 and Crunchy Frog received a treatment, from director Martin de Thurah, after only one short meeting. The treatment was in fact more like reading a poem, and started with the headline; epo-555 Le beat's on fire..(it's really on fire). Here are some small outtakes from the treatment:

(…)
A match
A matchbox
(…)
Afternoon, rough grey weather conditions
A square – a triangle upon it – a house – 100 houses in suburbia
(…)
A gardener puts on rubber boots
(…)
Arranges bonfire, attempts to light it up
Sticks his rake into the fire…all old memories burns

The three pages didn’t leave any indication of how to realize this … dream… vision… hallucination. But it didn’t matter! All epo-555 knew was that they wanted it – big time! The lack of time time before we had to release the finished video became even more self-evident when we asked them to give us one more… a video for “Pre-emptive Stroke” within the same timeframe!!! A second video-idea was then born: a video documenting the work Jan and Martin (and their cronies) did on “Le Beat's on Fire”. The second video was supposed to be released before “LBOF” as “Pre-emptive Stroke” is the first single from the album - a pre-emptive video so to speak! And since "PS" was documenting the production of “LBOF”, this video (to be released after "PS") had to be completed before embarking on the project of collecting the pieces that, put together, should complete the video for “Pre-emptive Stroke”.

You would think that such a crazy up-side-down inside-out process would end up in total disaster, but this amazing team of film makers came through for us big time. The video for "Pre-emptive Stroke" is a truely innovating weird little clip. It contains some of the most original ideas seen in video making for a long, long time. The mixture of animation and live action is far-fetched and unusual but still very captivating and involving.

“Le Beats on Fire”, you wont believe was made in just one week! It is really a masterpiece in itself – a validation of all the hopes and faith we had in Martin's initial psychedelic treatment – that it was made in one week is not a justification for any weaknesses – there aren’t any.

Look forward to seeing both videos on a screen near you!!!

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