The Meticulous Dreamscape of Slow Pulp’s “Falling Apart”
Interview by Matthew Melchionne and Jake Lazovick
Upon first watching Chicago band Slow Pulp’s music video for “Falling Apart”, your first reaction is awe, the second is, “how in the world was it made?” Director Jake Lazovick and Matthew Melchionne (Powered by Wind) teamed up to create the meticulously animated dreamscape over a span of three weeks. Paying homage to the Talking Heads’ music video for “And She Was”, the duo traversed the challenges of quarantine to create a beautifully crafted visual for the band’s debut album, Moveys due out this October on Winspear. Below, Matthew and Jake talk the making of the video, contradictions, representation in cartoons and how you don’t need credentials to make art.
Matthew Melchionne: So, what’s the lore behind this Slow Pulp video?
Jake Lazovick: Like how did this video come together?
Matthew: Yeah— Conceptually, not logistically.
Jake: Well, the very first thing I thought of was the hypnosis shot. Which, by the way, came out better than I thought it would thanks to your animation.
Matthew: Good, because I spent a full day making that chain look right.
Jake: And it worked. So, that was the first shot. Originally, it was a hypnosis video— except I didn’t want it to be a hypnosis video. I just was thinking about how nice a big yellow circle swinging in front of the camera looks. I didn’t want it to be a dream sequence.
Matthew: It is a dream sequence.
Jake: I guess. It’s not really a dream sequence. It’s just a dream. Saying “sequence” implies that there’s some other cinematic reality that we leave to enter the character’s mind. There’s a disappointment I think everyone feels when characters wake up and it is revealed that “it was all a dream.” I forget who said it, but something about how all movies are dreams so to make a character enter a dream sequence is redundant.
Matthew: This is similar to the two types of fantasy narratives we were texting about last week.
Jake: Oh yeah.
Matthew: One type of fantasy is when a character leaves their reality and enters the fantasy world. Stories like Alice in Wonderland or Digimon or Cool World. The Japanese call these stories Isekai. The other is when the whole story is staged within a fantastical world. Stories like Lord of the Rings or Dune. I find that the latter type are often political allegories which I consider wack. The former type, Isekai, are often more zany and indulgent because the fantastical must contrast with the mundane. Of course, this is reductive. But thinking in terms of dichotomy and genre tradition is fun for me (but is it relevant to our discussion?).
Jake: I didn’t think about fantasy with our video. I just thought Emily (singer of Slow Pulp) is having an off day. The kind that keeps poking at you. She can’t find the last pieces of her puzzle. She knocks over a music box.
Matthew: Her whole world disintegrates into a million puzzle pieces.
[Laughter]
Jake: Yeah, you know, everything’s “falling apart.” Originally, we were going to do a hybrid between animation and video. I wanted everything to be really flat and in focus. I like things to be really flat, in focus and close up. Or far away and blurry.
Matthew: When it was decided the video would be an animation, I got involved.
Jake: That was the day you sent me the animation you made for one of your songs.
Matthew: Yeah.
Jake: And the same day I watched or maybe was thinking about the Talking Heads video for the song “And She Was”.
Matthew: You referenced that video pretty relentlessly.
Jake: Yeah, everyday that we worked it was mentioned. I stole a couple ideas like the camera flashing or there’s that moment in the hallway scene where a trophy is spinning on a drill bit. I love that video. It’s by this guy Jim Blashfield. He’s made a lot of good videos. That day you sent me your animation, I called you about Slow Pulp’s video. I make a lot of collages and photoshop paintings but never thought about animating them.
Matthew: Then I came in to make everything dance.
Jake: And wiggle and warp.
Matthew: It’s super different from the way I imagine videos with human beings are made. There was no footage to sift through. Every frame and beat had to be planned from the jump. It was very methodical. We couldn’t just tell Slow Pulp to stand in a different spot and perform differently. That would have been several more days of work.
Jake: It really reminds me of programming drums versus recording drums.
Matthew: Yes! When you program drums, you need to do all this work to make the synthetic seem natural. But when you’re recording a performance, you more often capture something loose or improvisational and work to make it tight and in focus.
Jake: Yeah, exactly.
Matthew: That’s the whole problem we kept running into. We’d bounce a rough cut of the video and it would look dorky and empty and sterile. We’d be like, “Fuck! We need to put in more time to make it look more effortless!”
Jake: Honestly, I don’t remember making this video. I entered a three week bender cutting out backgrounds in photoshop.
Matthew: While you were cutting everything out, I had to make sense of several videos of Emily where she’s making these mouth sounds.
Jake: We should probably say it’s called viseme, which is the visual representation of phonemes. Which are the sounds you use to make words.
Matthew: Thank you Jacob.
Jake: So you were cutting out videos of Emily doing visemes in order to make her lip sync.
Matthew: It was incredibly strange to be staring at her performing like that. I’ve never met Emily, but for a week and a half I came to know her face very well. I suppose that’s what it’s like for people who retouch photos for magazine covers. But that doesn’t make it any less bizarre to me. I’ve never had to play with an image of a real person that much. Normally I work with landscapes or cartoons.
Jake: Maybe it’s less about staring at one person and more that you were looking through fractions of footage to find the right frames of mouth sounds that will add together to make words.
Matthew: True. It wasn’t like I was looking through different performances by Emily.
Jake: You don’t get the same phenomenon when you’re editing different performances because you’re not going through your clips frame by frame.
Matthew: It was uncanny interacting with the icon of a real person as if they were a 3D model or a paper doll. I can twirl a 3D model around, click on the nose and make it bigger or smaller as I please. And that’s fine. But then I do it with a person and suddenly I find it very bizarre.
Jake: You can tell neither one of us really knows too much about animation. We definitely understand the basics. But I feel like if you heard two animators talk… I wonder what they’d think about this video? They’re probably like, “this is so bad!”
Matthew: They’d probably say, “this is really amateur!”, but we taught ourselves which was cool.
Jake: We just thought about it for a second.
Matthew: That’s the coolest thing. I never want to learn how to do things the right way. I like learning how to do it myself with no officially sanctioned credentials. But I also worry/ wonder how this video might be received by faculty at an animation program at some art school. Or by staff at an advertising agency where there is a premium on snappiness.
Jake: Cause you want those jobs?
Matthew: I don’t necessarily want to be an animation grunt at some studio— but I would love to teach people what I’ve learned. It’s fun to teach. It’s fun to tell people, “you can do literally anything.”
“I never want to learn how to do things the right way. I like learning how to do it myself with no officially sanctioned credentials.”
Jake: I didn’t think at all about advertising or art schools.
Matthew: I did— mostly because while researching techniques and ideas I would often land on animator’s Instagram pages. They often seemed to come from CalArts, in particular, and go on to work for Cartoon Network. Which is probably why lots of those cartoons have a homogeneous look. A lot of those artists look like they watched Avatar as children, went to CalArts, came out, and then decided to make media that reflected all that. The “Steven Universe” diaspora, per se. While I’m happy they’ve found professional success, I think it’s resulted in a very reliable visual sensibility in American cartoons.
[Laughter]
Matthew: I guess our collaboration is a marriage of those two sensibilities.
Jake: Yeah. I guess it makes sense that I wasn’t thinking about the animation world. I have zero aspirations of being an animator.
Jake: Reflecting on the video… I do remember feeling like there weren’t enough “contradictions.” I feel like a struggle I’m having with my work is that It doesn’t “contradict” enough. It doesn’t have “wrongness.” It feels a little too “evenly split.” A lot of things I interface with, in culture, that I get mad at, lack intellectual texture. They lack dissonance and irony. I want everything to feel like those things don’t belong together, but they are together.
Matthew: Yes I see. I feel like one of the drawbacks of the cartoon/ commercial art sensibility is that they’re not interested in wrongness or contradiction. They’ve only recently discovered “rightness” and “justice” in the form of social justice. Now they try very hard to embody that by making a lot of work about marginalized peoples.
Jake: You mean like that Froot Loops commercial we saw?
Matthew: Mmm just in general! Consider shows like “Steven Universe”, “She-Ra” or “Infinity Train”. These shows have highlighted progressive themes like queer representation; racial diversity; and an emphasis on tenderness, kindness and collaboration rather than on action and domination. I like these animations! But I sometimes find them didactic, pandering or even self-satisfied in their moral pose. I resent the presumption that having somebody who superficially resembles me on screen is the holy-grail of good media! And I resent the satisfaction of a culture that hails those media-makers as great heroes for highlighting those themes I mentioned (or maybe I am jealous that I am not counted among their ranks).
When you or I try to inject “wrongness”, I think it comes from humbleness. To represent moral ambivalence, or even just silly contradictions, in a piece is an admission of fallibility. Our version of a “Persian Flaw”* so to speak. The so-called fine artists, as opposed to the cartoonists, pursue a depth of meaning that doesn’t necessarily map onto contemporary social or political problems. It can be more fun and interesting to contemplate.
Jake: Most fine art is morally deceptive too though. There’s nothing wrong with, “I thought this color was pretty, so I used it.” But for some reason you go to the gallery and you get long statements about what the art is doing and how the art is in the right. It’s the original morality as a marketing device. It’s this misconstrued definition of peace where we all agree with each other. I think peace is when we all accept that we won’t agree. I think about walking down the street. As I walk down the street I might imagine the world full of people who agree with me and who disagree with me. A world of black & whites and good & evil. But when I actually walk down the street who knows what anyone’s opinions are. Everyone’s contradicting each other.
When you have a contradiction or “wrongness” in your artwork, it more accurately depicts what it’s like to walk down the street. And by “walk down the street”, I mean, exist in the world.
Matthew: How do you try and represent that in art? With anti-heroes?
Jake: I guess the anti-hero. Does Clint Eastwood’s cowboy character represent what I want? Like he saves the day, but he’s mean about it? I’m not sure. The anti-hero is more so just a macho-fantasy rather than being truly morally ambivalent.
Matthew: When you think about protagonists that represent an author’s skepticism, you could pull in Obi Okonkwo from No Longer At Ease or Holden Caulfield from Catcher and The Rye. Here are characters who are essentially schmucks. Their misadventures illustrate the author’s skeptical and uncertain weltanschauung.
Jake: More schmucks!
Matthew: More schmucks!
Jake: I think that’s a Larry David bit! He says, “I’d rather be a rich prick than a poor schmuck!” That’s a much better way to think about the world! Forget about good & evil. It’s just so you want to have flaws? Or would you rather have flaws?’
*Note: There is no strong evidence that ‘Persian Flaws,’ or ‘Humility Blocks,’ are anything more than an orientalist myth about Iranian craft practices.