A stream-of-consciousness video created to match the spoken-word track from the local Los Angeles arthouse band “Steak Night”. They did a live presentation of their instrumental and unreleased track “The Little Dog”, and the Lead singer Bryan Stokes provided spontaneous lyrics. I was contacted to do a video to match the surreal and unpolished nature of this unplanned and rambling ballad.
After meeting with the band several times, they expressed a desire to tell a tale that folded in on itself and left the audience with a feeling of a circular journey that the Little Dog completed, but by doing so inexorably changed its world. Curving landscapes, soft versus hard lines, and themes of media and fantasy are woven throughout the piece of travel and journey to arrive right back where it began.
The entire sequence was storyboarded and rendered in 3d with rigged and animated characters, but care was taken to match the childlike and dreamlike quality of the music and words. Various techniques of non-realistic rendering were used in the last sequence to give it a hand-sketched and painterly look.
The design of the eponymous dog was drawn by Jhonen Vasquez of ‘Invader Zim’ fame.