"Weight In My Lungs" Big Ol' Animated Music Video I Made For The Heavy Horses

When I agreed to do the album art for “With Darkness in My Eyes” the hit album by outlaw country outfit The Heavy Horses’ whose front man Justin Mahoney might my oldest friend, it was basically agreed in the same breath that I’d also be doing a music video for it. Justin had secured some government cashola from Factor to make the album and that also included funding for promotional videos. Sweet sweet government dollars! There was a couple things to consider when making this youtube video. For one The Heavy Horses have a strange relationship with youtube where literally Millions of people listen to his music on there from fan uploads but he didn’t have any official music videos on his official youtube channel. This situation leads to an issue where other people are potentially profiting off Justin’s content without his control and direct benefit, so this feels like an issue I might be able help out with. So now that we got some proper funding, with Justin being one of my dearest friends in the world, plus the possibility that (if the almighty youtube algorithm behaves itself) a good few people might actually watch this video, I needed to go above and beyond and see how good a video I can make. Especially since I’ve been given a song as epic and cinematic as “Weight In My Lungs” to work with, I couldn’t half ass it. I mean I could but I’d feel really bad about it.  

I wanted to see how far I could take my animation skills. Is this video animated? kinda yeah, sorta no. Most of what’s going on is closer to puppetry in my mind than traditional animation. The majority of what you see are characters and scenery made from bits and pieces that I individually draw then scanned in at a fairly high resolution, I then drop them into Photoshop to carve them into separate bits and assemble them together, then I import the layers into After Effects, assign anchor points to the joints of the characters and tweak the rotation and position keyframes so they move how I want within the scenery that I’ve arranged into a virtual 3d space where I place a virtual camera and move that around to catch all the action. Simple as that. Nothing much is redrawn frame by frame but I tried to include an element of frame by frame animation in most of the scenes (like the birds in the background, some shambling men and the flames and smoke) so there’s always some variety in the type of movement being shown.

It was pretty clear that song called for a visual narrative. Justin didn’t want to tell me anything specific about the story behind the song and wanted me to interpret it however I wanted. If you’ve ever worked with Justin on one of his projects you will know that this is an unprecedented level of trust and freedom for Justin is very, very hands on with everything. Listening to the song I pictured the protagonist as a soldier or someone who lives with everyday violence and depravity who is looking back on his actions and confronting the emptiness of their worth and the despair he’s caused others. Pretty heavy themes. 

I had a general concept for the story I wanted to show but I never made a proper storyboard or animatic or anything, I just winged it, which is a large part of the reason why this video took ages longer than it should have. I knew the huge instrumental outro (with that absolutely amazing lapsteel solo by Christine Bougie) needed something to match it’s scale. I wanted it to break reality in a way and be just an orgy of confusion and psychedelics. It needed to be the apocalypse, which gave me a narrative goal to work towards. I just needed some event traumatic enough to cause our protagonist to trigger my psychedelic apocalypse. 

Initially I was thinking a regular break up might do it (heartbreak is a big theme in the album) or the soldier’s history of violence coming back to hurt or kill his lover would work but the lyrics describe the protagonist as being unable to commit to anyone so I didn't think that would fit the material quite right. As I began to develop the other scenes I realized it’s hard to build a movie around just one character walking through landscapes so I decided he needed a companion. If you go on his instagram you will know that Justin's one true love in his life is his white husky Ray so I figured our protagonist needed a husky companion. One of the more challenging parts of the whole project was animating the dog's movements, the way a dog walks is not very intuitive to figure out at all and I had to use reference videos a lot, but when I got it down I was pretty happy. But then I realized that I had the emotional key to the apocalypse right there, I had to do an Old Yeller, which apparently people feel quite strongly about. 

Because I didn't storyboard or do animatics like a professional I ended up with a bit of an issue when I started putting together my finished scenes in that they didn't flow together like I was hoping. The thing that makes music videos probably the easiest things to edit is that you have to cut to the music so you already know where the cuts have to happen. If a music video doesn't set to the beat of the music properly you notice it's off immediately and it doesn't satisfy. So, while I had enough footage to fill the runtime the movement within the scenes and the way they bump into each other didn't fit the tune well at all so I had to get creative. 

I had a pretty linear story in mind originally where the soldier wakes up from a childhood nightmare while on a battlefield, wanders the desolation for awhile, meets his dog companion, finds romance, loses romance, falls on hard times, meets his mother's ghost, wanders some more, his companion is killed, man becomes his demon skeleton father from his nightmare then brings about the apocalypse. A tale as old as time. But when I put them in that order it didn't work. I was worried that I'd wasted my time, that I’d have to cut some scenes drastically and have to make a bunch of new scenes. But then it occurred to me that I should try to do a Tarantino and shift around the chronology so that the romance scenes come earlier and sync with the lyrics and the desolation and wandering companion scenes are treated more like flashbacks. It flowed much more evenly then, although, I did have to make a couple in between bits like the graveyard scene and the rotoscoped vultures at the beginning and end anyway. Whatever. 

But of course the finale was easily the most work. Probably close to a thousand separate layers, half of which are moving in abstract patterns, it really tested the limits of my rig, my pirated copy of After Effects and my patience. It also tests the limits of the youtube compression algorithm, I had to upload multiple test versions to youtube to see if the level of detail and movement in it was just going to get completely ruined by the pixel crunch of their compression settings. Ultimately I was never gonna totally win that battle and had to accept that some of the details are gonna get crushed and washed out by the stream and just hope that people don’t notice it too much. In the end it turned out much better than the crunchiness of my Lo Siento video since there is almost no neutral static space in any frame of that video, it gets unbelievably pixel-ly and crunchy. I got my apocalypse looking pretty close to how I wanted it. 

Well this is the longest thing I’ve ever written for this website probably no one will read this far in so I think I’ll leave it here. If you like really in depth breakdowns of what goes into making any of projects let me know, I might do this again if I get bored enough. In the meantime just keep watch the video over and over and tell your friends to do the same.