This is

I filmed this over the course of three days. When I say “over the course of” I actually mean “ten to twelve hours a day for”. It seemed like such a simple idea, and such a short song, that I’d have it done in no time. Turns out it takes a bit longer than usual when you’re completely building brand new sets from scratch every three seconds of footage.

Storyboard/Animatic

At thirty seconds, this is a very short song. The first thought that came into my head (along with everyone else who entered the competition with this song, it seemed) was to take the lyrics literally and just show on screen what Adam was singing about.

In order to make sure I could squeeze everything into the available time, I put together a quick animatic - my first ever. I don’t have a graphics tablet and I’m not the best artist in the world, so this just looks like someone going crazy with MS Paint. I’m quite surprised how closely the finished film sticks to this original rough outline.

The Billboard Shot

The original idea for this video, as you can see from the animatic above, was for the car to come smashing through the shop window for the “drive back to her house” section but even I’m not stupid enough to try to animate flying shards of glass. That’s not to say I didn’t try - I just realised pretty fast that it was not going to be easy.

Luckily, I happened to drive past a billboard at about the time I was trying to think of something fun to replace a car smashing through a window. “That’ll be much easier to crash through,” I thought. Not so much, it turns out.

This took a whole day to set up, film and do the effects. By the time I’d finished, I couldn’t see properly and had to go and lie down. I probably won’t do another shot like this for a while.

Meatballs!

It took literally seconds to decide what was going to be on the billboard as the car came through it. Joe Cornish’s “Meatballs” was the other song in the Video Wars competition. The rivalry between Adam and Joe in the Song Wars segment of their show sometimes bubbles over into genuine fury and rage, mainly from Adam, so it seemed only right to stoke that rivalry further.

I was going to do a proper-looking ad with a happy Lego family gathered around a steaming bowl of meatballs but time was not on my side. Instead, I did a cheesy knock-up in half an hour so I could crack on with the soul-destroying job of copying and pasting it over and over and over again onto individual frames of the shot. Here, for your viewing pleasure, is a wallpaper-sized version of that very cheesy knock-up…

Behind the Scenes Pictures

Rather than upload all the pictures and then make a load of thumbnails and upload them as well, I’ve just put everything in a set on flickr. It’s the future, kids.

Check it out.