It feels like since 2008, the global economy has never been more than a nickel’s throw from ruin. At the same time, consumerism and consumption through physical or online goods have never been higher. It’s a delicate balance, walking a tightrope teetering over a likely collapse, and one that is explored masterfully and musically in James Siewert’s continuously revolving music video for Tender, the first single from Just Desserts’ fourth studio album, Curtains. Returning to Directors Notes, a few years since we last spoke to him, this new animated music video illustrates through stop motion the creation of our society as we know it today and how perilously – or inevitably – close it is to falling down around us. Watch Tender below, after which Siewert talks to us about the building of his own rotating Tower of Babel, collaborating with musician/actor/filmmaker Larry Fessenden to bring his song to the screen, how real-life fire and stop motion animation do not make happy bedfellows, and his hopes of hypnotising his audience.
Congratulations on the release of Tender. What was the thematic inspiration for the imagery that would accompany the song by Larry Fessenden?
When Larry sent me the song, I think I had already started envisioning a Babel-like construction on the rotating platform, being inspired by my printmaking professor Lothar Osterburg’s series of prints reinterpreting Bruegel’s Babel. Tender, with its themes of accumulation, consumption and decay, seemed like the perfect opportunity. Larry Fessenden – an indie horror auteur, here moonlighting as a musician – told me that the single’s leading image was in fact the Tower of Babel, and it felt like we had to do it.
You previously created an animation built on a rotating platform. What is it about that storytelling base that appeals to you?
I was interested in the dynamic between the growing sculptural form of accumulating frames and the more two-dimensional experience of the interior animation. The sculpture becomes the carcass of the film’s expired animated life, and by reconciling the needs of the sculpture with the needs of the animation, both end up taking on unexpected organic qualities, suggesting further growth.
The stop-motion animation reminded me of Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer music video, also with lovely visual cues on each lyric. What are the references and influences that inform your filmmaking style?
That’s great. I love that video – and it does have a great sense of play. You can tell that even though all the animation is very much of a piece, it wasn’t workshopped and mood-boarded to death, but they were kind of making their way through the song playfully. And that song is an absolute blast. I mean, of course, I don’t know exactly how that video was made, but there’s a sense of discovery in it. There are ads and music videos that ape that style but you can tell the frames have been picked apart by the agency and it doesn’t feel surprising – they feel ‘fun’ in scare quotes but you can tell that the artists weren’t actually let off the leash and allowed to have very much fun.
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