WHAT YOU GONNA DO???

Music Video, 2020

Animation Director & Producer

What you gonna do??? was my first collaboration with Bastille, and the band's first animated music video.

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Dan's brief revolved around something I think we're all struggling with: the constant fight for our attention. Endless scrolling, notifications, competing screens and the feeling that every second someone is trying to pull us somewhere else.

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Rather than telling a traditional story, I wanted the visuals to behave like social media itself. Fast. Chaotic. Constantly competing for your attention. Every frame was fighting with the next, just as every app on our phones is fighting for a few more seconds of our time.

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One of the biggest challenges was designing an animated version of Dan. It's a strange balance. Push too far towards realism and it becomes stiff. Push too far towards caricature and you lose the person. Somehow, it has to sit comfortably in the middle.

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As always, I called Hamid Bahrami. By this point we'd worked together on several projects, and I knew he'd immediately understand what I was after. His first sketches became the foundation of the entire film. He has an incredible ability to capture someone's personality with just a few lines, and his drawings gave the animation exactly the energy it needed.

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Looking back, I think we underestimated where all of this was heading. The film was about the attention economy in 2020. A few years later, it feels less like a concept and more like a documentary.