“TENDER”

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.

We tried to do that here where me and producer Walker White roughly mapped out that – okay we want to get to the cash register, and then there’s going to be a section with sculptures that represent these lofty civilizational ideals and maybe that gets overtaken by a freeway and a city, but we’re still basically making it up as we go along – like the freeway’s path isn’t pre-planned, the frame is allowed evolve organically. Often we 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.

The effect on the viewer is hopefully a kind of hypnosis where they aren’t worried about where something is going, or what happened before but simply involved in the imagery as it emerges.

I think this kind of music video is its own specific thing, that is different from my overall filmmaking style. I worked with Jason Filmore and Simon Davis on what I think of as this video’s spiritual predecessor during the pandemic – we made this long mixed media filmstrip out of performance video and found footage. This is a more sculptural version of that video. With this kind of video it’s all about keeping the plate spinning – you have one central idea – in this case stuff being added to a rotating platform – and you’ve got to keep thinking of new stuff that elaborates on the possibilities of that single idea. Like Micheal Gondry’s Come into My World video for Kylie Minogue is sort of a perfect video in this style because it sets up a simple, but ingenious conceit and then just follows the seed of that conceit towards its natural conclusion.

The effect on the viewer is hopefully a kind of hypnosis where they aren’t worried about where something is going, or what happened before but simply involved in the imagery as it emerges. That kind of screen-saver style engagement is different from narrative filmmaking where you are trying to set things up and provide dramatic catharsis. There isn’t any ‘payoff’ in that sense with this kind of video – you just follow an unbroken train of thought.

Can you tell us about the production process and the equipment used to capture these wonderful visuals and how long it took to do so?

Just used a Canon 5D for the stop motion and then cobbled together a kind of arm that could orbit vertically around the rotating platform. Probably you can tell that the video wasn’t that slick when it comes to lighting. There’s a fine line between charming and just kind of cheap looking when it comes to DIY stop motion. I think we stayed on the right side of that line for maybe 85% of this video. I think the tree growth at the beginning is the one moment where I’m like…that feels just way too rough.

The fire was shot on a RED Komodo with a motorized platform and slider. You only get one bite at the apple when burning something down, so when the fire engulfs the lighting it tripped the breaker and the motor stopped. Sort of an obvious mistake – of course we should have had the motor and lights on different circuits. But anyway, we just pushed the platform around for the remainder of the fire getting different shots. It’s one of those things where I think I wonder how the mistake affects the final video. Part of me wants the unbroken spinning throughout the fire and that would be more of a technical achievement. On the other hand, I think that it comes at the right time – it feels like the fire is actually attacking the video’s established visual structure. It’s slightly jarring in a way that maybe actually makes it more memorable.

I printed out all the frames and rescanned them as a kind of poor-man’s film-out, maybe to make a more unified look since there was no proper colour timing on this project. Most of the stop motion was created in three months of work between September 2024 and January 2025. Then the dollhouse build and burn and post-production was another month and half of work between August and November of 2025. All in it was about 130 days of work.

There’s a fine line between charming and just kind of cheap looking when it comes to DIY stop motion. I think we stayed on the right side of that line for maybe 85% of this video.

There’s a huge mixture of elements and materials within the film. Which parts of the build were the hardest to complete?

The slowest section to complete was definitely the lead up to the cash register – with the freeway and city forming. When there were many buildings in progress at the same time I only completed around 12 frames a day. In a way the cash register is the punchline to the entire video – because the sequence that follows is almost a denouement rather than an escalation.

The fire sequence at the end is as beautiful as it is destructive. Can you talk us through creating that sequence, mixing live action fire with animation?

Larry’s 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 videos 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.

What was the creative collaboration with Larry like and what was his reaction to seeing the final film and his performance within it?

Larry was basically hands off – allowing us to follow whatever weird fancies happened to strike. With the exception of the fire! 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 of Hitchcockian masterminding. What I like about filmmaking excavation and discovery is 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.

Despite being an accomplished actor in films like Habit, River of Grass and Bringing out the Dead, Larry was a little camera shy on this one. He kept saying that his face was his least favourite part. But I love how his little guy weaves in and out of the tower’s fabric. Every circle of hell needs its Virgil!

What’s a short film you’ve seen that you would recommend to the Directors Notes community and why?

Obligatory note that I feel like I’ve been in my own bubble recently and haven’t seen a ton of shorts. That being said, I watched a documentary short, The Grace, directed by Natalie Berger and Moira Fett, recently that was really lovely. It’s about a season of this Alaskan fisherwoman’s life – how it’s divided between the water and the land, and how hard it is to make a living that way. It’s amazing how the filmmakers manage to convey the arc of a year of time in 13 minutes.

When I watch a film I want to feel that every image on screen was the product of some kind of unrequited yearning. Especially now because really it is so easy to produce all sorts of visual gack without really caring about it. Every shot in that short felt like those filmmakers were really fighting to show us this one particular image. And that feels like the fisherwoman – taking all this time and care to lure the one particular species of fish that she needs to make her season a success.

What’s next for you?

I’ve been working on a long short for the past three years that is getting pretty close to completion. It’s about a woman whose apartment and body disintegrate while she’s on hold with a collections agency trying to resolve a medical bill. This music video was, in a way, an extensive detour from that project. That film is more the work that – ideally – I’d like to spend the rest of my life doing. Of course like any desperate artist I have unrealized scripts and outlines, that follow some way too optimistic life-trajectory.

I want to make movies about people trying to find their keys or something. The actual small scale struggles of daily life.

It’s not novel to notice that if you zoom in or out far enough the cosmic underpinnings of ordinary life become visible. But I don’t know how often films try to convey that emergence of ordinary/banal life out of the deeply mysterious and inexplicable fact and quality of existence. I think there’s a way to do it that audiences haven’t seen. Maybe The Tree of Life, but that family stuff in the Malick movie is still a little ‘big picture’ compared to what I’d like to do. I want to make movies about people trying to find their keys or something. The actual small scale struggles of daily life.

I don’t know – of course that has nothing to do with this music video! And longer movies require more money so even wishing upon a star in this era where everything is being scrapped and sold for parts feels vulnerable. It’s not 1997 anymore. Once the short is done, I’d be lucky to spend the rest of my days just making fun little animations like this one.