From Filmmaker James Siewert:
Larry and I started talking about a year and half ago.
In April of 2024 I made a small piece of animation that was the seed of the idea: frames of animation built up on a rotating platform. 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.
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 told me that the single’s leading image was in fact the Tower of Babel, and it felt like we had to do it.
I started vaguely planning different sites on the tower that would represent different lyrical moments – but allowed the construction to be fairly improvisational too. Often producer Walker White and I would decide to do something different than what we had planned on the day if we happened to find something interesting to incorporate into the construction. The election happened while we were animating and influenced and augmented the inclusion of newspaper sections.
Larry was basically hands off – allowing us to follow whatever weird fancies happened to strike. His one requirement was that a natural disaster of some kind happen to conclude the video. Fire was of course the most exciting to all of us. I think most successful music video are essentially 3 or 4 act compositions and that in the best ones the final rug pull slightly zags, taking a savvy viewer a bit by surprise. The fire I think keeps things fresh just at the moment that novelty of that the “growing tower” concept for the video has worn off. Figuring out how to incorporate the live action fire into the otherwise stop-motion video was another moment in which the reconciliation of different artistic impulses creates a more interesting experience.
Larry sometimes calls me an “architectural filmmaker”, which leads to some mild bickering – the chief pleasure of our collaborations. Part of the reason why I object to the phrase is that it suggests the filmmaker as having a master blueprint where the actual making of the film is just a paint-by-numbers affair where an essentially static plan is executed. I’m far from capable of this sort Hitchcockian masterminding. What I like about filmmaking excavation and discovery – the emergence of solutions through playful trial and error. When we make a film we set ourselves problems – different artistic impulses, or differing ideas amongst collaborators. The process of synthesizing sculpture and animation – or stop motion and live action – is not one that is done on paper ahead of time, but by following our noses, by remaining stubbornly playful and curious even as the walls close in around us.
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