Hoku & Adam on YouTube's Animated Anniversary

Last week, YouTube launched an epic animated video to celebrate 10 years since the platform was introduced and the epic piece features abarrage of memorable moments and popular content from over that time.

Created by Flying Object and produced by Partizan London with Hoku & Adam on direcvting duty, the film adopts the style of Blackalicious' Alphabet Aerobics and at almost three minutes long contains enough detailed content to have you watching again and again as the video scales through A-Z with themes attached to each letter.

Below the Partizan directing duo offers insight into the style and processes they carried out to arrive at their final work of art, and why taking on the brief went without saying.

How did the brief for YouTube’s 10th anniversary come about and what appealed initially about the idea?

The brief struck a chord with us right away.  When we were told the concept (a video that interprets classic YouTube moments in animation) we connected pretty hard.

When we’re pitching for commercials, there’s often this period of research where you look at the brief and you’re working hard to find the heart of the product and spot to build the pitch. But for this, at its core, the video is about celebrating creativity - the theme of the thing was understood immediately. And it’s about a brand we’re familiar with and love. So the pitch writing was easy. It was personal in a way. It was the hardest we’ve ever worked on a pitch, but was simultaneously the easiest.

The brief was brought to Partizan by Tim Partridge and Tom Pursey, (of Flying Object) who were looking for directors for the project. Alex Halley (head of animation and our awesome producer) put our names forward.

What were you asked to do exactly; what was written on the paper and asked of you in the meetings? Why did you feel you were capable of doing the project justice?

The brief was a little different than what ended up in the final film. The video features a theme for each letter of the alphabet, but the original brief celebrated several specific YouTube videos for each letter. So instead of Salad Fingers being under “Weird and Wonderful”, as he is now, he would’ve been under “S” in the original treatment.

The decision to change the focus more to themes happened early on and, in hindsight, was really smart. it opened the project up and gave it a much larger scale.

Tim, Tom and the client, Grant LaFontaine (of YouTube) specified what themes would go with each letter and gave us a list of preferred videos to choose from. We selected videos that we thought were best suited to animation and designed sequences around them.

What was great about this project was how much we felt the material from the beginning - you don’t really ask if you can do the project justice in that case. The concept was so strong and lent itself to so many fun ideas that instead of asking “should we do this?” it was more “how the heck do we get on board?”

It’s a massive task, considering the length of time being celebrated and material through all those years. Where did you start?

There were multiple versions of the sequence in prep and a LOT of discussions about how to embody as much of the last 10 years as possible.

It was a really collaborative process and we worked with different sequences and references until the mix felt right to everyone.

But yeah – it’s a lot to celebrate.  We hope we’ve done it some justice.

And YouTube means so many different things to different people; how did you manage to tap into that, do you think?

A lot of it comes from a love we have for YouTube content but a lot of it came from Tim, Tom and Grant. They really know the community and made sure we were casting as wide a net as possible in two minutes in order to honour the diverse group of people who’ve contributed to this big, big community.

How important do you think YouTube has become to the filmmaking community; people like yourselves?

The obvious answer is that it’s changed our abilities to connect with an audience in a big way. Before YouTube, you were doing well if you reached 5000 people in a film festival run. Now filmmakers can reach vast amounts of people via YouTube, and that’s amazing.

Also, on a subtle level, we think it’s opened audiences up to different and more experimental forms of visuals and filmmaking. There’s just so many distinctive filmmaking styles from around the world that everyone is seeing. So audiences seem cooler now than they were before with scrappier, handmade production value. Unique voices don’t seem quite as weird to people as they once did. In that way, things are exciting.

Tell us about the processes and techniques you used for the film; it's a bit of a mash-up of things. Can you define or explain your approach and style?

The thing that sparked our idea was representing famous YouTube moments via animation that you might see on YouTube. YouTube is this big cultural snapshot and recreating parts of it through mediums that YouTube creators use was inspiring.

So we tried to keep to styles we see and love on YouTube. Stop motion, anamorphosis, 8-bit, Minecraft, white board animation, sand animation, etc. Tim and Tom had a list of styles they wanted and we built from there. Nearly every animation style was a contained unit that we were directing.

We first created an animatic that served as a clear map of what we wanted to see. We’d layout our ideas of how to create moments and effects technically. Then the artists would take it from there, offering ideas and collaborating on the best routes to take.

What was great and challenging about it was we couldn’t confine ourselves to one technique or way of thinking because every unit was doing such different things. We had to be open and available to the possibilities and limits of each medium, and at the end of the day make sure everything fit within a pretty rigid, pre-designed sequence.

Were there certain criteria which had to be included; such as the vloggers, cats, and memorable moments like that through the years? How did you narrow the content down?

What to include was a constantly evolving conversation. Some great, memorable content such as Randy Pausch's Last Lecture proved not visual enough to be recognisable in the animated treatment. There was also a focus on making the content international, so sometimes it was less about showing the most-viewed references, and more about capturing the scope of YouTube across the world. There's so much more we wished we could've featured.

What about the music? Did you have much to do with that or was it already chosen and scripted in? Why do you think this choice works so well?

Alphabet Aerobics was in the brief, and we were 100 per cent behind it from the jump. It just makes so much sense to us, the song guides the viewer through the alphabet concept while simultaneously building in intensity to the humorous anti-climax of the very humble first video ever uploaded to YouTube. Other directions were explored, and they were fun to hear, but none of them hit home quite as well as Alphabet Aerobics did.

What was it like working on the job and having to keep quiet? How long did it take?

Frankly, the job was done quickly enough and had so many moving parts that we barely had time to spill any secrets even if we wanted to! For example though, one of the hardest secrets to keep was that we were setting up a display of props from the film in the Partizan office that we couldn't reveal until the film premiered. Apparently in the few minutes a window was opened to check the display, they had to beg a girl not to take a selfie with Charlie the Unicorn - that's just how passionate the YouTube fan base is.

Tell us about some of the challenges and how it all progressed?

The biggest challenge of this project was working with artists spread all over the world while building a very precise final film. Making sure our references were clear and recognisable in a matter of seconds was really tricky. Art that was super beautiful in any other context would have to be tweaked to make sure it was crystal clear - getting Overly Attached Girlfriend's smile just right, or adjusting the brightness of the spotlight on the Evolution of Dance guy's sketch to make sure it felt like the original video in such a removed medium.