Sean Pecknold: Madness in his Methods

David Knight meets Sean Pecknold, a man whose methods are as quirky and brilliant as his work and include such practices as shooting dissolving clay in a fish tank and mapping out the world of his music videos.

As Sean Pecknold was growing up in Townsend, a suburb of Seattle, his dad used to bring home videotapes of Monty Python, featuring the iconoclastic animations of Terry Gilliam and Oregon-born claymation pioneer Will Vinton. And the originality and distinctive vision of the work of these animators struck a deep chord with the young Pecknold, and his brother Robin. “We were both into animation,” Pecknold recalls, “A lot of my favourite animators are lone wolf characters – its just them, and you can see that in the films. You see that every part of it was touched by them.”

Years later, Sean Pecknold is keeping the spirit of individuality alive, often in collaboration with his brother. Sean is known for his mixed media work, his stop-frame animations, and, above all, his superb videos for Fleet Foxes – the successful folk-rock band led by Robin Pecknold – the latest of which dominated more than six months of his life last year, as he toiled in a studio with paper cutouts to make the eight-minute epic for The Shrine/An Argument.

Doomed elks and dancing robots

The Shrine video encapsulates Sean’s uncompromising approach to his work with Fleet Foxes. It tells the story of a heroic elk who lives in a dark, enchanted forest and must battle fearsome, demonic creatures. The hapless elk is ultimately killed and then dismembered by a two-headed sea-serpent. It is a powerful, mythic tale, made in a pre-digital style resembling that of Eastern European animation from the 1970s. It is also a thing of beauty, attuned to the haunting track like few music videos you will see this or any other year. It nearly won the best music video prize at the 2012 Vimeo Awards in June (and it would not have been a surprise if it had).

“I’ve listened to that song more than the band has – it became my world,” says Sean. “We agreed on the character style, then the band went on tour, and I said: ‘I’ll have a video for you in six months’...” After that, he barely left his small studio in Portland, Oregon – working only with one other animator and an assistant.

The Shrine is the latest of his body of work for the band, which ranges from music videos to documentary footage, to visuals for their live shows. But there is also much more to Sean Pecknold than his work for Fleet Foxes, and more to his work than his animation.

Take his recent promo for critically-lauded indie outfit Here We Go Magic’s How Do I Know – a quirky, live-action video set in the desert around Palm Springs, featuring a bizarre love triangle between a late middle-aged man, his young wheelchair-bound wife, and their dancing lady robot. It’s as bright, uplifting and joyous (albeit with a certain poignancy) as The Shrine/An Argument is mesmerisingly tragic.

His new video for indie-rock stalwarts The Walkmen, The Love You Love, is also live-action, albeit including some rudimentary CGI work, which he shot once, then reshot on his iPhone. There are also his photography projects, his documentaries, and his esoteric low budget feature project – winningly titled The Internet– A Blog Cats WTF Universe.

And then there is his commercial work, including his new ad for IKEA, A New Kind Of Catalogue, for McCann-Erickson, New York. That takes the viewer through the 60-year history of the furniture giant, and then introduces the digital enhancements available with the latest IKEA catalogue – all in a sweep of a long tabletop. The brand is represented in familiar wooden shapes, the extra brochure content made visible with IKEA-customised smartphones and tablets.

Following father’s hip hop steps

Following work he has undertaken for BBC Knowledge, The New York Times and Nike, IKEA’s A New Kind Of Catalogue is Sean’s biggest commercial so far. “It’s a step up in the commercial world for sure, with the biggest crew I’ve had,” he confirms. “It was a really quick turnaround, but I had a big art department of eight people. If I needed blue boxes, they would make them in ten minutes.”

For Sean, now 31, this is still quite unfamiliar territory and in many ways he is still coming to terms with the typical division of roles in filmmaking. The fact is, he likes to do both – to direct and to “make stuff.” It is key to his identity as a filmmaker. As well as harking back to his admiration for the likes of Gilliam and Vinton, he sees it as a function of how he came to be a director. “I didn’t choose the traditional route, through film school, or even animating school,” he explains, on the phone from his home in Portland. “I always considered myself a filmmaker who used animation because it’s accessible and it’s fun. And I felt I had ideas that were larger than I could pull off in live-action, with a DV camera.”

In fact he started as an editor – following in the footsteps of his father Greg, who, Sean reveals, had a very cool job in the early 90s, when grunge made Seattle the centre of the music universe. “He worked at a post house and ended up editing grunge videos and then hip hop videos. He’d bring home Alice In Chains videos and A Tribe Called Quest videos, saying ‘I cut this today, check this out.’ When I was 13 I thought: ‘that’s what I want to do.’”

A time-travelling thing

A few years later, Sean was working as a staff editor at a post house in Seattle – but becoming increasingly dissatisfied with his lot. In 2006, he entered a 48-hour film competition with his friend Matt Daniels. The result was Manquer (or Missing) – a comedy about a French boy who loses his legendary Tour de France-winning racing bike, shot in a stop-motion pixellation effect. Manquer won the competition – but it had already changed Sean’s life. “That was my two-day film school,” he recalls. “It felt so good that I quit my job on the Monday after that weekend. I’d decided: This is what I want to do.”

Around that time Robin Pecknold’s career in music was also beginning to take off. Fleet Foxes were signed to Sub Pop in the US – the venerable label that signed Nirvana and many of the original grunge bands. Their debut, eponymous Fleet Foxes album came out in 2008 to near-unanimous acclaim and healthy sales. A music video was needed – for the track White Winter Hymnal.

Sean embarked on the ambitious task of telling a mythic tale in stop-motion animation, featuring model representations of the band being prematurely aged, and then rapidly rejuvenated by the turn of a ‘wheel of time’. It is an astonishingly accomplished work for both the director’s and the band’s first ever music video. “I had no idea if it was any good,” Sean says. “You don’t know how people are going to react. They were a new band, who didn’t have anything visual out there, so no one expected for them to come out with a subtle time-travelling thing.”

Triangles with character

Two more highly idiosyncratic videos for Fleet Foxes followed: He Doesn’t Know Why, an unconventional performance video with an audience comprised entirely of goats (shot on Vashon Island in Puget Sound, just south of Seattle); and Mykonos, which was Pecknold’s first attempt at stop-frame with paper cutouts.  Replicating the animation styles of earlier times admired by both the Pecknold brothers, the video uses geometric shapes, in particular two triangles, as characters. It was “made on a small table bought from a used furniture store with glass on it,” says Sean. “And stacks of books holding up a piece of plexiglass.”

Videos for other hip indie bands also followed – Grizzly Bear, Elvis Perkins in Dearland, Beach House – all exhibiting the same experimental spirit. “The Elvis Perkins video – we shot that in a fish tank, with clay dissolving in the water. That was cool.” Then he made his two films for BBC Knowledge – Eat Up Brain and Honk If You’re Human (for Australian agency The Monkeys). Among the best things Pecknold has done thus far, these films encapsulate his virtuosity and remarkable facility for complementing wordy and cerebral scripts with vibrant and entertaining visuals. Both ads are a riot of visual ideas and techniques – mainly a combination of model and puppet animation in mini-sets, claymation, and flat art animation.

“[Honk If You’re Human] was done on a similar scale to Mykonos – on a small table I found in a store,” he remembers. “That’s what I like about stop-motion. You can make it really small with really simple elements and have it kind of create something large and impressive.” He has also executed the stop-motion animation for the Nike ad Larry Fitzgerald (directed by Oh Hello), and then directed a claymation viral for The New York Times Magazine illustrating the advantages of a long-lifespan smartphone via the tale of a stick-and-plasticine man spending his entire life on hold to ‘the meaning of life hotline’. “With advertising, it’s fun, when you’re brought on board to create and guide the visual tone,” he says. “I’ve lucked out, worked with good agencies.”

But after their first album’s extraordinary global success, he also spent a lot of time with Fleet Foxes documenting their progress as they toured the world. “It was a unique time,” he reflects. And when it came for Robin and the band to write and record the second album, Helplessness Blues, he began to document that too, shooting lots of Super 8 footage that was to becom the basis of the video for the album’s first single, Grown Ocean.

Mapping out a music video

Then came The Shrine/An Argument. Sean reveals that he and Robin took themselves away to one of their favourite areas – Joshua Tree National Park in the Californian desert, and nearby Palm Springs – to thrash out the idea for the video. “We’d be talking about making it some kind of a journey,” he says. “We stayed up one night writing a script of things that could happen. And then I drew a map of the world – this is going to happen here, there’s a mountain, forest here, another forest here. The song is three distinct sections. So I wanted three main visual movements to match.”

Serendipity in the desert

Sean also mapped everything in After Effects before doing the ‘real’ paper animation, using his most sophisticated multiplane apparatus so far –  a larger second-hand table. “It was a linear journey which I shot in sequence, and that meant that two and a half minutes in, if I had a new idea at the four-minute mark I could do that.”

But what is the meaning of a story that sees the elk dispose of its partner’s body at the beginning of the film, face numerous challenges and then ultimately succumb to the dark forces around him? “I felt I had a sense for where the songs were coming from – and that song in particular,” Sean says. “I think Robin was writing about a relationship that had ended because the process of making the record was so all-consuming. It’s kind of a mixed metaphor for creation I think.”

And ironically the all-consuming process of making the video then took its toll on Sean’s relationship with his own girlfriend: they split up during its production. Since then, perhaps not surprisingly, he has been focusing more on live-action, calling it “an itch I want to scratch.”

In the case of the Here We Go Magic video, serendipity helped make it happen. The Pecknold brothers were back in the desert near Joshua Tree, and Robin was playing the as-yet-unreleased How Do I Know to Sean. “We’re driving down this highway listening to the song, thinking ‘that’s a jam’. Then I checked Twitter and there was a direct message from Here We Go Magic asking: ‘can you make a video for this song?’.”

Appropriately, Sean came back to Palm Springs to make the video and it’s a delight, thanks to some inspired casting, and the dancing of Jane Paik aka Janet Pants, who plays the engaging robot who comes between a man and his wife. Sean had previously seen Jane dancing at a rooftop event in LA (“she’s a friend of a friend, and we stayed in touch”), and he explains that her robot character, and her rather touching relationship with the husband, is a gentle parable about our growing emotional attachment to technology. “I’m really fascinated by where this is all going,” he explains.

As for where Sean Pecknold is headed, he looks destined to continue to do things on his own terms. He is comfortable with taking the commercial projects that work for him – without currently even having official commercial representation in the US (he’s with Friend in London, and the IKEA job came via LEGS, the New York directing duo, also repped by Friend, who occasionally send him scripts).

But there will always be the personal projects, and the way he puts his own spin on things. His recently completed video for The Walkmen’s The Love You Love – which was shot, he says, in the most haunted house in the old section of Philadelphia – was funded by clothing store Urban Outfitters. But having shot the video on a RED camera, he then ‘distressed’ the footage by re-shooting it on his iPhone.

Moving into mumblecore

He is now working on a new video for upcoming band Pure Bathing Culture – and he is working to complete his low-budget indie movie project that he has been collaborating on with old friend Matt Daniels. “We’re trying to finish the film we shot last November in Berlin and Iceland. We’re hoping it’s a feature. Its kind of mumblecore-y, but there are visual effects and animation that we’re trying to finish right now.” And he adds that brother Robin will also be involved. “His instrumental stuff is amazing, and he’s going to score the film we shot in Berlin,” Sean reveals. “It will be fun to flip the process – him working on my stuff rather than me working on his.”