Back in 2014, I drove out to Opelika, AL, from Sugar Hill, GA, with sound equipment for Justus Stout’s wedding reception. There was this guy, Sean Sullivan, who had flown in to Atlanta from Oakland, CA for the occasion, and he needed a ride out to Opelika. I had heard of Sean, or at least his band Warbler, because Michael Minkoff must’ve shown me this music video some years before:
I don’t remember liking this video very much when I saw it. I wasn’t sure what I thought of the guy in it; I couldn’t tell who he was, exactly. Was he kidding? The lipstick confused me a lot, and I wasn’t sure I really understood what he was talking about.
My passenger seat was available, so Sean and I went ahead and became friends real quick.
Sean is hilarious. He has the confidence that I’ve always wished to have—fearless. Late night after the reception, a bunch of us went to Waffle House, where we saw a lot of sunburnt men dressed in very short cutoff jeans. Apparently, there had been a rodeo earlier, and I guess that’s how they celebrated. After our meal, we retreated to the parking lot, and realized Sean wasn’t with us anymore. Looking through the windows, we saw him interacting with a group of the rodeo-goers. All at once, they stood up from their table somewhat aggressively. As they followed him outside, I wasn’t sure if Sean was bringing us a lot of trouble.
“Hey, does someone have a camera?! I want to get my picture with these guys!” I remember him saying.
The next morning, we gathered at Justus’ in-laws’ house for brunch, and a desire for a musical encore arose. I had all of the sound equipment in my car, so we set up on the back porch, and the guys jammed for a little while.
I felt like I had made a good friend in Sean over the course of that weekend, and it was hard to see him leave. I didn’t get to see him again until early 2015, when I had the opportunity to work with Sean on his Kickstarter video for Warbler’s album Sea of Glass. The album is pretty heavy, with songs about abortion, suicide, tyranny, drugs, Christian conversion and subsequent persecution, and the end times. Revisiting that video again 6 years later, it feels even more relevant.
But Sean acts like a goof-ball. He has very serious ideas about very serious things, but doesn’t seem to take himself all that seriously—probably my favorite kind of person.
Later that year, Sean came to perform at a Renew the Arts fundraiser dinner, and was working on a video for his song “The Idiot”. He wanted to get some footage in a cow pasture, to represent his time living in Georgia where he became the Jesus-loving “idiot” to his peers in California. We found a farm close by, and the timing for the light was perfect! I remember that we didn’t feel comfortable approaching the house to ask for permission to film. “Well, should we just do it?” Sean probably asked me. He has a charm that seems to get him out of trouble pretty regularly, so we went ahead and started filming. Eventually, a sweet old lady on a golf cart came out to greet us. It was no problem.
The next summer, as I was finishing up the Renew the Arts animated promo video, Sean and I were texting, and I mentioned I could really use a vacation. I had spent over 100 hours animating that video with my hand-painted illustrations, and was ready for something different. Sean mentioned that he would love to fly me out to help him build some hot-tubs, if I wanted to make some money working for him. And while I was out there, we could film a music video for his song “Golden Gate.”
We didn’t storyboard anything. We just figured we’d wing it. So we filmed him walking up onto the Golden Gate Bridge,
walking around a cemetery,
and singing directly into the camera . . . nine different times, each time with less hair than the time before.
From the second floor of his apartment building, we got some green screen footage of him splayed out on a stool, so we could make it look like he was falling through a wormhole or something. For the original wormhole footage, we strapped a GoPro to his bumper and drove through a tunnel, and then mirrored it vertically.
After I had started editing the footage back home in Georgia, we started having some more ideas for shots we thought we needed. So Sean flew me out again 3 months later.
We had both gotten into time-lapsing, and that trip, we got a whole bunch of time-lapses!
We had ideas of filming shots that would depict the song more literally.
Sean wrote out the lyrics to the song as though they were a suicide letter.
He prayed on his hands and knees.
He dunked his head in a bin full of water and screamed at a GoPro on the bottom.
He held a gun to his head. And honestly, no matter how much he assured me that the gun wasn’t loaded, I still felt really uneasy about it.
We filmed a long-exposure time-lapse of him shaking his head for the lyrics “even demons believe and shudder.”
We time-lapsed some weird scene of him shaving his beard off, and we played the footage backwards in the mirror.
We spent another day on the bridge. We got there at a much better time, when the sun was setting really beautifully and there were a lot fewer people out.
Sean had liked how the green screen thing looked with the wormhole-tunnel-thing, but he wanted a better setup for it, so we got some footage that really made me nervous!
This music video was getting pretty weird, but I was trying to give Sean what I thought he wanted. I cut some of the footage together, and was never very happy with it. Sean and I had a lot of conversations about what we could do to fix it, and eventually, Sean asked for my working files, so that he could try to finish the video himself.
Then we both got busy with other things, and a few years went by. Over these years, I’ve felt pretty guilty about not delivering on that video, and I worried that I might have disappointed Sean.
Right before the coronavirus pandemic hit the US, Sean and I had a conversation and he asked me what it would take to get me to finish the video. I already felt guilty for the number of times he had flown me out to Oakland and paid for everything, but I also had no idea how much more time it was going to take me to finish it. I gave him a number that would justify me taking the time, and he said, “Deal! Do it!”
So in late February 2020, I pulled out my old hard drives and made the video a high priority. It was a little daunting because I didn’t really remember where I left off, or even what was left to do. We didn’t have any kind of clear plan. What we had made so far was pretty “out there,” so I just kept it going in that direction.
I very much wanted to make this video worth the wait and investment to Sean. In the years since I had last opened the project files, I had learned some new tricks, so I stuffed in as many as I could. For instance, I had seen a really cool Reddit post demonstrating a free tool called EbSynth that applies a painted frame to every frame of a video. So I used it to animate a digital portrait of Sean.
Then a friend of mine told me about another tool called DeepDream that Google’s working on to give computers the ability to “understand” what they “see”! In order to determine what something is, all a computer really has is pixel data. Imagine having a list of pixel colors and their coordinates, and having to determine from that, “What you’ve got here is a picture of a Golden Retriever.” Well, anyway, it’s really crazy. 1 They’ve done some pretty fun things with DeepDream. My particular interest was in the deep style transfer that you can do with the Deep Dream Generator. I used it to apply this gold design style to a frame of Sean singing into the camera.
Then I threw that image into EbSynth, and … I don’t know, I think it’s pretty cool.
I pulled a few all-nighters, and in just a couple weeks, when I had a version of the video that I thought was good and weird, I screened it for Michael, his wife Vanessa, and friends, to get their critique before I presented it to Sean.
They were not happy.
More than that, Vanessa was actually upset. She felt that I had made light of a heavy subject; essentially that I was tone-deaf. It was hard to hear—I really wanted her to tell me that she loved it. She felt bad that she couldn’t be more affirming of the work I’d put into it, but I knew she wasn’t trying to tear me down. I learned in school that critique is ultimately for the sake of your art being as good as it can be. Vanessa loves the song, and really wanted the music video to invite the audience to reflect on the lyrics. She thought what I had made was an extreme distraction, and was not serving the song well at all.
Her suggestion was to scrap most of the clips in the video, and have the whole video be more contemplative, where the camera would just follow Sean walking on the bridge, and occasionally cut away to him singing his inner thoughts.
BUT, Sean spent a lot of money flying me out to California. Twice! AND I was getting paid to finish it! And he shaved his hair off for this video! And he took time off work to film all these crazy scenes! And I’d done a lot of work on all those clips! Was none of it worth salvaging?! Was it all for nothing? And how was I supposed to deliver a video to Sean, after 4 years, that I could’ve shot and edited in a weekend maybe?!
I didn’t feel like I was going to be giving Sean what he’d paid for. I’m learning, though, that putting a bunch of hours into work doesn’t necessarily make it good. I want to be humble, and I wanted to be willing to do whatever was best for the video, even if it meant that I had wasted a lot of time fumbling around thinking that making this thing more complex was going to justify the time and money that went into it.
As Michael considered Vanessa’s suggestions, he proposed using some of the leftover footage to make a video for an entirely different song. The song, “Inhibitor Inhibitor,” which happened to be immediately after “Golden Gate” on the Sea of Glass album, is about a character losing touch with reality on some kind of hallucinogen. So it made more sense to use my weird footage for that.
Now I could give the “Golden Gate” video the treatment it needed, and feel better about some of the footage that we’d spent so much time getting.
Initially, I intended to make a quick little video for “Inhibitor Inhibitor” out of the “Golden Gate” scraps. But, as with much of my work, I got a little carried away.
I most particularly wanted to honor the fact that Sean shaved off his hair for a video. I especially respect that because it would take a lot for me to be willing to shave my head, and if I ever agreed to it, it had better be worth it!
I don’t think it mattered as much to Sean, though.
(Watching that still makes me laugh SO hard every single time I watch it.)
It was difficult to conserve the different-haircut footage, because he was singing the wrong song nine times. In order to make it work, I went through seven different “hair takes” and pulled screenshots where Sean was making the mouth shapes (“visemes”) I needed to lip-sync the new song. Then, I lined up all the screenshots in Photoshop, and cut out the mouths and eyes. I had gotten some experience with lip-syncing and visemes in Adobe Character Animator when I made the animated teasers for the first season of the Renew the Arts Podcast.
I had committed to Sean that I would deliver the “Golden Gate” video by the end of March, so I finished as much as I could on the “Inhibitor Inhibitor” video, and as a surprise, included it at the end of the “Golden Gate” file.
Sean didn’t get back to me for a couple days, which felt like a lot longer. He runs a successful hot tub installation and maintenance business in the Bay Area, and he was in the process of buying a house with his wife, so the delay was understandable. But, man, was I anxious to hear back what he thought of what I’d done.
When we finally talked, Sean was incredibly enthusiastic. And he was thrilled to have two videos now! He gave me a few suggestions, and I told him that I wasn’t really finished with it. Michael and I had discussed some extra animations that might add a little more interest to the “Inhibitor Inhibitor” video, and I asked if he would mind waiting just a little bit longer for the fulfillment of our agreement. “Sure! Do it!” Sean laughed excitedly.
So I did. For the next three months.
Side note: For the puppet animation, I used this exceptional plugin called DuIK that creates a skeleton you can attach your character to! The folks at Rainbox offer this plugin for free! It’s very incredibly generous of them. I’ve been following them for a little while (since “the Meet Micah” video), and they have an admirable philosophy concerning their work and its value in the world. It makes me so hopeful to see these kinds of organizations—like Wikipedia, WordPress, Blender, and us at Renew the Arts—openhanded with their offerings, trusting in the generous patronage of those who care to see them continue their work.
Anyway, as I worked through the video, I worried that if there was a lot of repetition, you might get bored and turn it off. I don’t know if that’s coming from insecurities about the quality of my work, or the real fact that the market is flooded with all sorts of other things vying for your limited time. But I put a lot of pressure on myself to keep making it “cooler.”
So I added some new hand-drawn stuff as well. Early on, Michael and I discussed having some simple line drawings to represent the “sawtooth peaks,” the “swollen creeks,” the “grizzly bears,” and the “honey bees.”
I have a hard time doing simple. I have a really hard time with abstraction. It’s like that Brian Reagan joke where he asks, “How do you decide if art is any good? Realistic art you can tell because you can compare it to the real thing—‘Hey, there’s a painting of a bowl of fruit! Hey, there’s a real bowl of fruit! That’s a great painting! That looks just like a bowl of fruit!’ Everybody agrees, and you move on, ‘Man, that guy can paint some fruit! That looks just like an apple!’ But abstract art; who decides if that’s good or not?” That’s why I always prefer to work from references, because it’s easier for me to assess myself. I’m good if I make it look like the reference. But if I stray from the reference, what’s the standard for determining excellence? It seems to become subjective.
This video certainly pushed the boundaries of my comfort zone. I wanted it to. This is some of the most abstract art I’ve made.
Still on that quest to keep you interested, I thought it’d be fun to make a really trippy looking spiral of Puppet Seans with his different haircuts represented. It was a fun challenge figuring out After Effects Expressions (essentially JavaScript) to make it happen.
At the end of the video, I had originally cut to an early version of the lip-synced Sean with his normal body, but it seemed like it would be better to have some actual video footage to finish the video out. I asked Sean if he could take some time to get some footage singing the end of the song, and he said he would try, but that it would be hard to make it a priority with everything he had going on.
In a moment of inspiration, I thought, “Michael’s son Ephrem kinda looks like a young Sean—they’re even sort of related—cousins. What if I had Ephrem sing the end of the song?! That would be a lot easier!”
Ephrem did great!
I didn’t really give him much direction at all. He thought of doing the funny facial expressions himself. I think because he had seen the video a few times up to that point.
If you know Ephrem, you know he is very wiggly. I tried to have him sit still, but he just couldn’t do it. I worried it might’ve been a bigger problem, but when I stabilized the footage, locking his nose in place, his performance worked really well.
When I sent Sean the final edits of the videos just recently, he asked, “How do you want to release them? Put me down for: as soon as possible.” Initially, I responded, “I’ll upload them to YouTube this weekend!” But, as I thought about it, I wondered if there might be a more strategic way to release this video. I don’t want to just release the video, I want people to watch it and appreciate it.
It got me thinking: Over these years of knowing Sean, I’ve gotten to know the guy wearing lipstick in that video as a hard-working, wonderfully generous, goofy, patient, thought-provoking, and talented friend. And his art means a whole lot more to me when I think about the guy I know who made it. That’s why I put this post together. I want you to know Sean a little more like I do, and perhaps appreciate his art more because of it.
(And it’d be pretty cool if I got some more animation jobs from this.)
Here’s the final “Inhibitor Inhibitor” video if you haven’t seen it:
- All I know about it, I pretty much learned exclusively from this video. ↩