Cartoon Brew Pick: Winston Hacking & Phillippe Tardif’s ‘Listen2Me’ Music Video

Canada’s animated collage wunderkind, Winston Hacking, teams up once again with stop-motion maestro Philippe Tardif to create “Listen2Me” — a blistering visual tour de force.

Toss Terry Gilliam into a blender with Michael Snow, and you might end up with something as spectacular as Hacking’s “Listen2Me,” a music video for Foxwarren. Featuring stunning stop-motion animation from collaborator Tardif, the piece is a technical and visual explosion, an unsteady zoom ride, perhaps inside a man’s chaotic mind, where we encounter an array of faces, objects, and scenarios.

As the singer laments not being listened to, the video’s frenetic imagery underscores the idea that if only people truly paid attention, they might hear that he has something to say — a relevant message in an era where our unchecked, scrolling-induced ADD mindscape leaves little room for meaningful connection.

Phillipe Tardiff offered insight into the production:

We only had a few weeks to create the video and Winston had already established the constant camera move forward in his shots so I thought this was a great opportunity to try a technique I had heard of, but never played with. I looped animation, like the brain dancers or the blooming flowers, by using a motion controlled camera to shoot the frames out of order, instead of straight ahead, the way it is typically done in stop motion.

Basically, I would shoot all the frames of pose one, reset the camera, move the cutout puppets to pose two, shoot all of those frames, repeat… It allowed me to reuse animation and get it all in camera. That meant that some animation, like the lipsync for example, had to be shot blind essentially, but that kinda worked with the automaton/windup toy animation style I was going for.

A graduate of Sheridan College’s Media Arts program, Hacking is known for creatively recontextualizing found footage and photography through compositing and stop-motion animation. He has directed music videos for Flying Lotus, Andy Shauf, and Run The Jewels, with his work screening at international festivals including Ottawa and Annecy.
Quebec-born Tardif has worked in animation for over 20 years at Aardman, Laika, and Copernicus, among other studios.