Greg Jardin: Concept Artist

Greg Jardin’s stop-motion music videos are technical triumphs that also manage to remain uplifting, warm-hearted affairs and are almost guaranteed to generate a viral online buzz. David Knight meets a director now keen to test his high-concept approach in adland.

There was a time when Greg Jardin was struggling to convince record labels and bands to commit to his high-concept ideas for their music videos. Now he has a different problem – persuading them that he is capable of making more than highly conceptual videos involving stop-motion animation.

But when you consider much of the work he has made in the past couple of years, it is perhaps an easy assumption to make. It really started with his video for Canadian outfit Hollerado’s powerpop anthem Americanarama, featuring the band interacting with animated visuals – generated by people rather than computers. Behind the band, 24 people are lined up on four levels of scaffolding, providing a skip-framed, choreographed display of graphics with different man-sized cards – the sort of visual idea that rock band-cum-visualperformance artists OK Go would die for.

More recently, he made a stop-motion tribute to the late Joey Ramone and his home town, for the song New York City, featuring dozens of New York residents – including a smattering of well-known faces – morphing into each other as the camera leaps forward around the city.

Jelly bean tour de force

And between those came arguably his greatest tour de force thus far, the jaw-dropping music video for Kina Grannis’ In Your Arms, where the Californian singer-songwriter performs with colourful, perfectly rendered animated backgrounds created entirely from jelly beans. That low-budget video – which took nearly two years to complete and was made possible by jelly bean company Jelly Belly – is virtually a test case on the effectiveness of social media in generating publicity and views for an inspired piece of filmmaking.

It was a viral sensation on release, notching a couple of million views on YouTube within days – and also crossed the digital divide into TV and magazines. “It really made me appreciate the power of Twitter, Facebook and sharing in general,” Jardin says. “I knew it had the potential to do well online, but I was surprised how fast people saw it and how fast it spread.”

With his Hollerado and Ramone promos also becoming viral hits, the LA-based director appears to have the knack for getting the right kind of attention in the digital domain. His best work may be high-concept but it also has a mainstream appeal, and he is clearly a performer-friendly director: the artists stay centre stage and give winning performances – Grannis being a case in point – in very demanding circumstances.

Even when the artist is necessarily absent, as with Ramone, his videos are people-focused, uplifting, warm-hearted affairs. He has also directed a couple of crowd-pleasing commercials. In his ad for Earth Hour 2011, the Australian initiative against climate change, he orchestrated hundreds of volunteers to create giant images shot from above to promote its energy-saving message.

And, earlier this year, he also wittily updated the legendary 60s ad for Die Hard batteries, featuring a car left for months on a frozen lake. His version, called Frozen Lake Revisited, could be described as its little brother – featuring a toy car to promote Die Hard’s domestic-use batteries.

Building a reputation

But in truth, the current momentum for Jardin is very much in music videos, and he is cultivating an enviable reputation. But he says there’s just one issue: “It has been a bit of a hurdle, lately, trying to talk to people into doing things that are not stop-motiony.”

Hailing originally from Washington DC, Jardin describes himself as having been an ordinary movie-loving kid until his horizons were radically widened by seeing Larry Clark’s controversial Kids in the mid-90s. “That was the first film that made me think that maybe I could make films myself,” he says. That journey began at college in North Carolina in the late-90s, when he joined his school’s rudimentary film course. Then he went to work as a runner/PA on movie shoots in New York. “I realised I had no technological knowledge of filmmaking whatsoever,” he says.

So he applied to attend the super-intensive graduate film programme at Florida State University, becoming one of only 24 students accepted annually on the course. Suddenly, at his disposal were film cameras, 35mm film stock, Avid suites and more – and he didn’t waste his big opportunity. “The programme has state funding, so they already have budgets for making films,” he explains. “Everyone directs three movies while working on everyone else’s movies, and everyone has to pitch to direct a thesis film – which they only give for five people to direct. I was one of the lucky five.”

Life in the real world

His thesis film, called The Problem With Fibre Optics, turned into something special. It’s a screwball 50s-set comedy with a retro sci-fi storyline and a decidedly Oedipal subplot with very impressive production values, and demonstrated Jardin’s nascent talent as a writer, and a director with both a visual sense and who is good with performers. “My influences were Blade Runner, Forbidden Planet, Pillow Talk, Plan 9 From Outer Space and Edgar Wright,” Jardin says. “And it got me a lot of attention.”

After finishing at FSU in 2006, Jardin headed for LA, and shortly afterwards signed with @radical.media for commercials and music video representation – effectively on the strength of his college film. It was testament to the quality of his work but, he concedes, it took him a while to adjust to the new reality of post-college life.

His music video-directing debut – a low-budget effort for a New York-based band called New Atlantic during his first year at Radical – proved to be a useful learning experience, if nothing else. “I wasn’t thrilled with the end result. But it was my first lesson into how far money goes in the real world,” he says. The first video he was remotely happy with was for the band Luna Halo, a powerful performance video for the track Untouchable, with the band performing within a baseball batting cage that’s electrified to repel the band’s haters.

“I was hungry to do stuff that was more high-concept,” he recalls. “I actually pitched versions of the Americanarama idea twice before – it took two or three years to get that video.” He took a step forward with his video in 2009 for Priscilla Renea’s Hello My Apple, featuring the singer-songwriter performing in front of an ever-changing background comprised of theatrical flats and props, taking her from her bed to an art-directed ocean voyage, a city and a forest – a sort of non-animation forerunner of the Kina Grannis jelly bean epic.

Then, in mid-2010, he pitched his in-camera animation idea to Hollerado, and finally hit pay dirt. “I saw that their album art was hand-drawn with a Sharpie, so I decided to take the same approach with the treatment and handwrite it,” Jardin explains. “I heard later that they responded to the treatment simply because it was handwritten. But I have to give them credit – especially Menno, their lead singer – for believing in the idea.”

Once confirmed, Jardin necessarily planned every second of the shoot with an attention to detail that has become his hallmark. He created an animatic of the background in After Effects, then made a spreadsheet of the animatic to pinpoint exactly what the squares held by the people on the scaffolding needed to be showing at any time. “I numbered every possible change in the song – which added up to 400 numbers,” he explains. “When we were shooting, the first AD was looking at their laptop, calling out numbers the whole time. Each person had a script at their feet so when they heard him call the numbers out they knew what to do. That’s the way I figured it out – and if you watch closely, you can see the people at the back are looking at their feet the whole time because they have scripts down there!”

Preparation pays off

The preparation was also important as this was also a one-take video, and not actually stop-frame animated at all – it just ended up looking like that. On the shoot, the track was actually played four times slower than normal – so it took thirteen-and-a-half minutes to shoot a take.

“Then, at the end, we just speeded up by 400 per cent in post, so it looks really jittery – and then cut out a bunch of frames,” he explains. Acclaim for the Americanarama video came quickly, and as well as leading to a second video for Hollerado – another one-take extravaganza for Got To Lose featuring an all-girl vintage dance troupe performing an umbrella dance – it would also lead to him making the stylistically similar ad for Earth Hour 2011 a few months later, his first proper commercial.

Shot in Sydney, this time the crowd-sourced images (a lightbulb that lights up and a bicycle with rotating wheels) were created by people wearing coloured squares on their heads and shot from high above, to awe-inspiring effect. “Again, it required a lot of planning ahead of time,” he says. “They had an idea that it should be like those Korean stadiums where 2,000 people create images – but we couldn’t afford 2,000 people, so we did it with 200.”

And by this time his proper introduction to stop-frame animation was well under way. He had previously worked with Grannis when she won a major talent contest, sponsored by Doritos, in 2008 – she was one of ten artists chosen in a music industry talent search. “People could vote online for their favourites and the top three then had a professional music video shot for them,” Jardin says. “Radical was hired to do those videos – and I was randomly paired with Kina to make her video.”

Two more years

A portion of his performance video for Message In Your Heart ended up being shown at the Super Bowl when Grannis won the competition outright. The prize was a recording contract with Interscope Records, but the singer ended up leaving the label and releasing her album Stairwells independently – she had already built up a huge fan base by posting her own videos on YouTube. “That’s when she asked me if I was interested in doing another video. I’d had that jelly bean idea floating around in my mind for a while, pitched it and she loved it.

I just didn’t really have the best idea about how long it was going to take…” And the statistics involved in the making of the In Your Arms video are quite mind-boggling. From the initial call to its completion in late 2011 took a whopping 22 months. As with Americanarama, it required frame-by-frame planning via a computer program, creating the changing scenes of the simple storyline and then matching the artwork (by illustrator Lauren Gregg) in jelly beans – about 250,000 jelly beans in all – with around 6,000 in every one of the video’s 2,400 frames. Jardin points out that this was not a continuous slog.

“I shot other things. Kina went on about four tours in that time – it was on and off,” he says. “Once we started and could see how it was going, it kept us pretty excited.” This was important as in about half the video Kina is placed among jelly beans for real, shot one frame at a time – but she remains a consistently sunny presence throughout the video. “She was great. At the time she lived about a mile away from me, and we shot the whole thing in my second bedroom, so it was very easy for her to get over here.”

A separate pitch to Jelly Belly, based in northern California, had secured the resources to make it happen – over 350kg of jelly beans. “The fiscal value of the beans was more than the budget of the video, so had they not supported us I don’t know how we would’ve done it,” Jardin says. “I wrote up a seven-page proposal including style frames – but, ultimately, I think they agreed to it because they just really liked Kina.”

Jumping beans

Surely Jelly Belly would have kicked themselves if they had passed up this relatively cheap marketing coup; their product became closely associated with a music video that ended up being featured on US TV talk shows and in Time magazine. But Jardin says that it was the sheer speed of the response that astonished him. “My dad called me the day after it came out and said he saw it on the news.”

With this demonstration that there is nothing like an original idea to keep the online viewer – who, potentially, is even more distracted than the TV viewer – glued to the screen, not surprisingly Jardin started to be in big demand after In Your Arms came out – particularly to create another stop-motion epic. Just as understandably, he wanted to make something completely different – and directed the Frozen Lake Revisited ad for Die Hard out of Y&R in Chicago. Shot in Montana in early 2012, there is a real element of surprise as the car starting first time on the lake turns out to be a toy.

“That wasn’t as high-concept as other things recently,” he says. “But doing commercials is definitely something I hope to do more of in the next few years.” However, Jardin was then lured back to stop-motion due to his long-standing devotion to punk rock pioneers The Ramones. He had agreed to cut an electronic press kit for the new Joey Ramone album, then the label encouraged him to consider making the video for the track New York City. “I realised that it was the closest I’d ever get to making a Ramones video. It was super-low budget, but I made my mind up I was going to do it.”

Trademark Ramones

He endeavoured to make a video that would incorporate the city and its inhabitants as much as possible, and came up with an idea that had numerous New York citizens lip-syncing the lyrics on the city’s streets, replacing each other in the frame, and all linked by the inclusion of the trademark Ramones motorcycle jacket on each person. The video took three weeks to complete – and was shot at the height of New York’s sweltering 100-degree summer heat.

“It was fun, but it was tough and, again, took a lot of planning. My friend Daphne Raves, who also produced the Kina video, produced this,” Jardin explains of the video which features several New York-based musicians, actors and comedians – including Tommy Ramone, the band’s original drummer, celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain and cast members from TV show 30 Rock – as well as ordinary New Yorkers.

“We tried to get as many iconic NYC people as possible and, being flexible, we only took up 30 minutes of their time. By the end of it, we’d been through the whole city.” He has been rewarded with another big online hit. Furthermore, his most recent project has no stop-motion animation element whatsoever. His new video for UK band The Joy Formidable sees him taking a confident step into a different style. The video for This Ladder Is Ours is a band performance shot in the middle of a dust storm. The band then become dust people before driving the storm away with the sheer force of the music.

“The song sounded both aggressive and ethereal, so I just thought about having a performance in an elemental environment – a dust storm – and then it becoming surreal,” he says. Is he moving away from the high-concept ideas to something more cinematic? “I was trying to do something that was different from my recent stuff,” he admits. “Something conceptually simple, but aesthetically strong. It seemed like the perfect opportunity for that as they were looking for a performance video anyway.” At this point, it certainly looks like the guy who does great visual ideas and great performances just expanded his horizons once again.