Meg Myers - Running Up That Hill (2020)

All that work for five minutes!

This entire newsletter could have been focused on animated music videos. For me they’re the peak of music video filmmaking. I’m just amazed by the level of work that goes into animating something for five minutes and it’s just for a music video?!

While I don’t think this music videos for Meg Myers’ cover of Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill is my favorite animated video of all time, it’s up there just for the sheer scale of production. This video was hand colored by 2,130 children and is 3000 frames! That means they had to storyboard and record the entire video first on video, and then create coloring pages for the frames, enough that it was smooth but not so many that they would have to find a million people to color the pages. They then had to find and coordinate with multiple places where children could color the video. Wow.

In the release for the music video, Director Jo Roy elaborated on how the video came about:

"The production process for “Running Up That Hill” began with a demanding green screen shoot in which Meg climbed monkey bars, hung upside down, flew using a harness and wires, and performed her first piece of choreography! In post, we erased all the rigging, added animation components that were moved around using visual effects (including wings), and put every frame through a photoshop filter to define the “coloring book” lines. Then, the frames were printed off into individual coloring pages which were distributed to 10 schools and various organizations in Los Angeles and Canada for children to color with real crayons also provided. Finally, the colored frames were collected and re-scanned to create one colorful final video made by literally thousands of people!"

Nothing can ever overshadow Kate Bush’s original rendition of this song (bonus video below, another hit!), but I can appreciate the amount of labor and coordination Myers’ video took.

Thanks for reading Looping Records!