What is the film about?

A handmade animation of over 3,000 frames using mixed media created over 4 months, directed, edited and animated by musician and artist Rachel Croft for her self penned song Bittersweet, with camera work from Michelle Fredericks.

The animation explores themes of time travel and dream states, allowing the audience to fall with Rachel, back into rumination, where things are not quite as they seem, familiar places where faces are obscured, images faint and faded. The story honours the lonely beauty in growing out of things, and warns of the fate which befalls anyone who might spend too long in the past, reaching back for something that’s no longer there.

What influenced it?

I was inspired by the will to use one’s own hands in a world of AI, filters and digitisation, and to actively take up an extremely time consuming, effort filled process as an act of rebellion against today’s obsession with efficiency, and what seems today as an indulgent use of one’s time.

I love the creativity of music videos such as Sledgehammer by Peter Gabriel, and Take On Me by A-Ha. I don’t want wonderful human made, painstaking works like those to be a thing of the past.

Making of Bittersweet © Rachel Croft

A little background information...

As a full time independent musician from a pretty normal background, I have been a bootstrapper my whole life. Since I was small I’ve always had the mentality of: if I want something, then I need to work out HOW to get that to happen, usually for as little money as possible.

Paper is a big part of it – a cheap material easily found in great quantities. A life size pony I made when I was 11 from papier-mâché, the floor length dress made with thousands of hands cut from magazines for my college art project, hand drawing all my own artwork including zoetrope style animations for vinyl discs.

Making of Bittersweet © Rachel Croft

When I heard about animations like this, I just knew I had to learn how to do that, regardless of the time. I knew it was out of the question to hire someone else as it would be impossibly expensive, so my only option was to do it myself.

I think the fact it takes so long – 4 months for this project – is what makes it so impressive, especially doing that alone – if I said hey I generated this animation in a few hours, really I don’t think anyone would care. I certainly wouldn’t.

This is just the next step of pushing what is possible.

Making of Bittersweet © Rachel Croft

How was the film made?

We shot the raw footage in a studio and around Enfield near London, based pretty spontaneously on my creative vision, with my photographer and friend Michelle Fredericks filming. I then took the footage and edited a basic sequence, then printed out the frames in order on around 350 pages.

I then began the time consuming task of editing by hand: painting every tiny frame, adding collage, drawing, cutting out hundreds of myself with a scalpel blade and printing out images for layering, using stock footage videos layered on more paper beneath to turn very ordinary footage into something magical.

Every image has a purpose, my old house growing from the ground, the car mutating into our old family cars and ones I used to see as a child, flying through the doors of my old school, the leisure centre, places I knew, the spectre near the end projecting the interior of my grandmothers house as I embrace it…

The works were then scanned back in and hand cropped back into a video of well over 3000 frames. No filters were used for the animations, and no frames were repeated.

I personally love how kind of obviously fake things look, it’s so quirky and imperfect, and how this technique is absolutely timeless. This will never look outdated because it’s already nostalgic in style. It will always look cool and will never not be impressive just down to the work that went into it. If anything it will become more impressive as AI becomes a normality in creativity.

Not doing another any time soon but I don’t regret a second of those 4 months, totally worth the toil.

@rachelcroftmusic I make music too but this is cooler to look at #musicvideo #animation #handmade #artreveal ♬ original sound – TreeHouseBus