Music
Music News
Music Projects Archive
Recommended Websites
Back to Arts and culture Index Page
China-UK Creative Entrepreneur Network
Forward Motion British Screen Dance
2010 International Master Class on Directing
Super Vision Design Art Show
John Moores (SH) Contemporary Painting Prize
BBC Symphony Orchestra Shanghai Concert
bahok Farewell In Beijing
cubed: latest UK science news
Scholarships and work in the UK
Register for IELTS
Studying in the UK
Job opportunities
Britain in China
Visit Britain
Britannica
Interview With Minivegas
Director Profile: Minivegas
Airplay UK reel 2
I’m Dan,
I’m Aoife,
I’m Chris,
And I’m Grant.
Aoife – We’re a collective of animation and live action directors. A couple of us met at university and then we’ve picked more members up along the way. We came up with the name because we found this dilapidated shed that had a few fruit machines in it and we thought it was quite funny….
Chris – …some dodgy old arcade thing from the 70s…
Aoife – …with the sign falling off and it was called Minivegas and we just thought that was quite apt!
PLAID - clip
Aoife – It was the first music video really wasn’t it?
Grant – It was based on synesthesia. It’s a condition where…
Aoife – …you hear, like your senses are mixed up, you hear smell and …
Chris – you might smell a certain kind of food and you get a colour, and there’s people who see green grass and it makes them feel sick or something like that and that was the song that Plaid had written, and they were quite keen, well they said we could do something for any of their songs but because of the visual crossover…
Grant – …and we got to name it, got to choose it and name the song which is kind of cool.
Chris – It’s live action but with effects more than animation…
Grant –We all had jobs and stuff and it did drag on for a long time. We’d like work in the daytime and in the evenings we’d do the effects and stuff and it would go on through the night. Nearly sort of killed ourselves doing it but it was good fun.
Aoife – I think cos it was for quite credible artist, it probably opened some people’s eyes. It certainly gave us a bit of a launch pad into getting the next piece of work we did which was a piece for Live Aid, for the Make Poverty History, and it was a boy deteriorating.
Aoife – and then it was Bloc Party really that totally got us noticed.
BLOC PARTY – clip
Aoife – We really wanted to do a video for them and we wrote a really in-depth treatment, we did really in-depth story boards, animatic, before we won the job.
Chris – We were told they wanted a fully animated video on a budget that you don’t normally get a fully animated video and they we were really keen on being animated characters in their own video, so we kind of made one of them and that kind of showed them we could do it.
Aoife – It was meant to be kind of environmental, some of the ideas in it.
Chris – The song was about Pioneers and inventions…..
Aoife – …and inventions that go wrong…..
Chris – … and progression that ends up in some sort of detriment
Aoife – yeah, exactly yeah, like something that’s so progressive to begin with but then kind of spreads destruction
Chris – like gun powder
Aoife – so we had the gun in there and we shot out of the gun, the cross breed animals at the end, like half pig half lizard, you know the effects of radiation, just kind of things like that.
Grant – If we’d done it again, we definitely would have filmed them performing, then we could have used their movements
Chris – You get little nuances in their performance but we didn’t have much reference footage of that
Grant – we didn’t have time, they weren’t available, they were touring
Chris – America didn’t like the version of ‘Helicopter’ that was made so they asked us if they could use that but we had to use lots of lip sync so they gave us more money to animate an extra minute’s worth of footage so they’re singing Helicopter but we just re-edited it
Aoife – So it’s kind of weird when you watch it to Helicopter for that reason, but the animation, because there was a lot more time, it’s a lot better in Helicopter
Chris – Helicopter’s a better video
Aoife – so it’s an odd thing, so a lot of people were a bit confused about it.
BLOC PARTY - HELICOPTER
Aoife –We found out that you probably need representation to get a stream of work, so we started going around meeting the different companies and then, yeah, we made our decision.
TEST ICICLES - clip
Aoife - We pitched on Test Icicles first video and that was called Circle Square Triangle. It’s a zombie pink B movie kind of thing with a performance in a bunker and lots of pink smoke and harks back to like old 80s metal band videos and stuff. Cos they kind of had all that in their music and they had that hip hop thing which was a big basically like a big mish mash piss-takes of 80s kind of stuff
Chris – …which is what their music is about…
Aoife – …yeah that’s their music, like bastardising lots of different genres and making them into one thing.
Aoife – and we just don’t see the point of why you have to follow one style all the time. I suppose we’re a bit different like that and it actually confuses people. But we like actually making it fun for ourselves and therefore changing styles and doing something different and justexperimenting a bit
Chris – Most directors get pigeon-holed. They hit on one style and that everyone likes and then kind of do that for the next 10 years and it seems a bit boring. We struggle with some things because no one knows what they’re going to get. It could be one of five or six different things but I think it’s better
Grant– We live and work in Shoreditch in East London which is a really fun place to be, it’s full of young people who are mainly artists, musicians. If you want to go out and find out what music’s going on, it tends to be more round here and it’s a good place to be on the ball and to meet the bands and that’s always good for what we do.
FIELDS - clip
Grant – It’s a mixture of stop frame and CG animation
Chris –mixing that and shooting everything you know on camera with stop motion then doing the bits that are a real pain in the arse like characters moving around, doing that on CG just cos it was easier.
Grant – All the budget went on washing up bottles and bits and pieces to build the set – twigs and bits and pieces!
Chris – It was supposed to look like a little sort of set and it would take ages to make a twig look like a real twig in CG. It was easier to shoot it. Sometimes you go one way, and sometimes you go the other way.
JOHN CALE – Jumbo clip
Chris – The John Cale video, that was about Bush and Blair, just being greedy and stealing all the oil, and that sort of thing. But we weren’t allowed to mention them, or do anything literal, which we didn’t want to do anyway…. So we just did a piece about greed: these creatures eating everything they could get their mitts on and then everything’s gone and they’re sick. And that’s pretty much it!
I know that with most of animations, there’s a real process at the beginning where we have to sign off characters, and the design of them. With live action everyone knows what a human looks like, and you can get a good idea of what it’s going to be like but with animation it’s quite difficult to give a style frame without actually doing the work, so we’ve always got to design the creatures, send those, get approval, there’s quite a lot of back & forth sending lots of style frames. Eventually a couple of weeks in it’s all signed off so you can run with it. It’s always a bit tricky. With things like John Cale, the original designs were quite a lot more grosteque so it just probably the record company who don’tt want to push things so far. We always try to push things as far as possible originally and they then get taken back. Corinne Bailey as well.
CORINNE BAILEY RAE clip
Chris - And they sent us the treatment idea which was just to produce a kind of Aristocats, Star Wars, Jabba sort of musical. And we came up with a treatment of all these odd-looking creatures playing their little music and there’s a massive sort of Jabba-esque creature who’s then forcing all these people to play for him and if they’re not up to scratch, he whips them off and gobbles them up.
Chris - We were just gonna make Amp a big hairball and Corinne…
Aoife – …Lips, lips on legs|
Chris – and that just turned into one of the other characters she was just like long legs, in high heels and a massive fat arse with some lips on the front. But they weren’t having that. They wanted to be humanoid and so in the end we got away with just making her into a mermaid and Amp just wanted to look like some kind of 70s pimp. And that just encouraged us to make everything else look as disgusting as possible!
We had just 6 weeks to produce 3 minutes whereas Pixar has, I don’t know, 3 years, not to produce like 3 minutes but then they’ve got 300 people working on that whereas there’s just 4 of us working on that. You’re supposed to be able to animate a second a day and we had to do 10 seconds a day so you’re gonna miss out on little nuances and stuff but I think it’s quite successful in that respect that we got quite a decent animation standard in quite a short space of time.
AMP FIDDLER feat CORINNE BAILEY RAE – IF I DON’T
Aoife – We come together when we get a track in and we pool our ideas. Sometimes someone’s ideas are leading and everyone goes “Yeah! That’s good!” and that person goes off and does it really.
Chris – Everyone kind of like, not takes it in turns, but leads a project, whoever’s got the best idea for a video, we all sit down and 4 people shove their ideas in.
ALI LOVE clip
Aoife –We’ve made 2 videos for Ali Love. The first one was a documentary of Ali on a bender. It was literally a DV camera, rocking around Shoreditch filming funny stuff that correlated to the story of the song.
We tried to make it a bit vintage. Dan did a really nice grade on it and then we did a lot of after effects to it, to make it look like Super 8 basically. A lot of people thought it was shot on Super 8 but it wasn’t ‘cos we didn’t have the money!
Aoife – One of the things that singles us as Minivegas out is that we literally do our treatments and we do storyboards, we do the filming ourselves often, we do the editing, we do the animation and so a lot of the jobs we’ve done, we’ve done everything here in this building.
DANIEL JOHNSTON clip
Aoife – Daniel Johnston’s artwork is the main inspiration for it really. I mean his own little stories that he tells. If you’ve seen the DVD, if you’ve seen the film, he has these amazing nightmare short stories, and this huge fear of the devil and he’s always drawing these brilliant cartoons so all the characters are inspired by his cartoon characters that he’s drawn over the years
Chris – …sketches. There’s more CG in there than actual stop motion stuff…
Aoife – It’s got that kind of nice clockwork effect to it
DANIEL JOHNSTON – TRUE LOVE WILL FIND YOU IN THE END
Dan – The Elektrons video, because it’s a kind of hip hop song we just thought we’d like to use old stuff, old footage from New York. Because there’s 2 guys rapping in it, from Jurassic 5, they suddenly wanted to be in the video as well, so we came up with these characters for them.
ELEKTRONS clip
Dan – But then this Soup guy was like, “No, I wanna be a super hero” so we had to go back and make him into a guy who fights monsters.
Aoife – We used a lot of documentary footage, old documentary hip hop and disco footage that we selected out of tapes and tapes and then we shot some extra stuff.
ELEKTRONS – GET UP
Aoife – I think for the Maps video the idea came from one line in the song that says something like – I’m probably going to misquote it now, but it says something like asking a question to the sky and not getting a reply. So that concept was seed for the whole idea. It’s about people trying to escape the sadness of their lives and being given this opportunity to ask why things in their lives have gone so wrong.
Aoife – We had a small budget – it was £15k but we managed to shoot some anamorphic 16mil largely through pulling favours. We wanted to be really mind-blowing and huge, so we thought if we went and made a robot with bits of things in it... We had a really, really tight schedule as well, and we just didn’t think it was feasible to make anything other than a giant egg!
MAPS – TO THE SKY
Aoife – I think we all, ultimately, want to do feature films and stuff but music videos just seemed like…
Chris – …it’s just a way in to honing your skills and still getting paid for it, rather than making short films that no-one is going to commission you for really straight off
Aoife – Yeah, I mean it’s a way of making a living and being creative really isn’t it, music videos.
