NY duo Huff This!, made up of singer/keyboardist Jazzerina (aka Alison Clancy) and singer/guitarist/drummer Bear Cub (aka Molly Allis) are making such amazingly creative media, from songs and albums to music videos, that if you ain’t wise to Huff This!, you are doooooooooomed to suckerdom in perpetuity. They’ve recently finished production on an epic, homebrew music video extravaganzic explosion of DIY awesomeness.
Behold! (And after the video, we’ve got a nice interview with Bear Cub. Sweet, wonderful, Bear Cub!)
The SuperForest Interview With Bear Cub of Huff This!
SuperForest: What inspired the making of Seahorse?
Bear Cub: Seahorse was inspired by a shoe box diorama I made one day when I was bored. I like tiny magical worlds. I built a snowy mountain scene out of paper inside the diorama, and sent a picture of it to Alison Clancy (HUFF THIS!), who liked it and thought that it could somehow be turned into a music video for the song Seahorse that we had just recorded. She is the ultimate co-conspirator! Wouldn’t have happened without her.
SF: Tell us about the production of the video.
BC: I decided to work with cardboard and paper because I love cheap art. Beautiful things can be made out of trash, and trash is everywhere! I got a lot of advice on how to build the sets from Jae, (the cinematographer), since he was the one who’d be framing all the shots, and had a good sense of what scale everything had to be in. Eventually, the sets had to explode out of the shoe boxes to accommodate the camera.
It was shot as a stop stop-motion animated video, which means Jae used a still camera to capture the movement, which gives the video its choppy quality. Jae’s advice to me was to just keep building as much as I could to make sure we had enough material to fill the 5 minutes of the song. My tiny room in Brooklyn became an insane cardboard puppet world! It was great.
SF: Did you do all the animating yourself?
BC: I created all the sets and puppets for the video myself, but Jae was definitely the one who brought everything to life with stop-motion.
SF: What did you learn from the experience?
BC: I remembered that I love projects where music and visuals work very closely together to tell a story. They feel equally important to me. I did directing/design at NYU for theater, and did a lot of puppetry, so I think I’m just now getting back to my roots of story telling using a bunch of different elements. But animation is a new thing for me, and since I think tiny worlds are magical, I’m discovering that animation is a great way to capture that!
SuperForest: What are you working on now?
Bear Cub: I just started working on a rock opera of “re-creation myths” about the journey of remembering our way back to living in our hearts, and not being so much in our heads. I’d like it to be animated with stop-motion as well, and I’m becoming more interested in using stop-motion with people too. Lots of the material for it came from my experiences being out in the woods on the West Coast for the past year and a half, hanging out with some big trees. I am very excited about it!
SF: Are you an optimist?
BC: Yes, I am a huge optimist! We as humans are capable of so much more positive transformation then we allow ourselves to imagine, and I think if we all focus on that–the positive transformations of healing and remembering that we are literally are all connected as one big family on this conscious planet, things will start looking up. They already are. Oh, and don’t stop having fun, that’s the most important thing!
Check out Huff This! They rad and rad and more rad on top.
Cinematographer Jae Song’s site - jsong.org
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