Fran Healy gets animated in new Travis promo

Scottish band Travis is back with the first track and accompanying video from their new album, 10 Songs, which is released in October.

The video for A Ghost, created during the Covid-19 lockdown period, is directed and drawn by Fran Healy, the band's lead singer, along with his son Clay, who oversaw the leading cinematography. Before becoming a singer, Healy was a student at Glasgow School of Art and though a good draughtsman had never taken on an animated project before.

"A Ghost started out as a mocked up picture of me and three ghosts playing the last chorus of the song in a deserted alleyway," says Healy. "It looked cool so I took that image and back-engineered a story out of it. Just when everything was ready to shoot, the world went into lockdown, so we had this great song with no way to make a video. Frustrated and in an act of desperation, I decided to draw it. Before I was a singer in Travis I was a student

"It worked out that it would take around 30 days [to complete the video] which landed exactly on the deadline date. So, I drew and drew and drew and drew; 2,500 drawings later, it was done. One day I was watching a sequence back and when it got to the end of what I had drawn, it flashed and went into live-action. It looked great. That was the moment I realised I could shoot the mock-up picture of me playing with my band of ghosts in the alley way. This helped in three ways: 

1. Filming the last 47 seconds would save me 10 days of drawing. 

2. I could recruit my 14-year-old son, Clay, as the cameraman. He has a drone camera so could shoot it remotely and could use it as part of his school video project 

3. Most importantly, we could film it socially distant. 

It was the most bizarre video shoot I have ever worked on. You realise how important proximity is to getting things done when it's taken out of the equation. But we did it and it turned out great. Clay has to wait till we release the song to hand in his video project."