Guitarist/songwriter Mike Campbell and his band The Dirty Knobs debuted a new music video that employs a hand-made, cut-out, paper aesthetic. Hell Or High Water features Lucinda Williams and appears on the band's "Vagabonds, Virgins & Misfits" album, which is out now on BMG.
The video was directed by character animation designer/art director Matt Nolte (Cars, Ratatouille, Incredibles 2) and co-directed/produced by Greg Dykstra
(The Nightmare Before Christmas, Finding Nemo, Up). Its puppets and western sets were made entirely out of recycled materials and animated in realtime by hand.
Hell Or High Water called on the talents of 20 creators, many of whom had worked on features such as
Inside Out 2, Coco, Luca, Soul, Elemental, Pirates of the Caribbean (2, 3 & 4) and
What If?.
According to Nolte, the video's look was inspired partially by the short timeframe the team had to complete the project.
"Traditional animation would have been impossible," Nolte reveals. "I am in love with making stuff with my hands, and the idea of puppetry made cardboard and paper a good choice for the medium. Material, at least, would be free. Some trips to Costco's trash pile solved that."
Nolte says he made a quick cardboard likeness of Mike Campbell to show his managers.
"Besides a loose imagining of it in my mind, I made it up as I built it," he recalls. "What came from that became the bedrock for what the world would look like. It was spontaneous and fun to do. That spirit remained as more people joined in and started making stuff. We had a blast discovering how to solve designs in the moment. I think the feel that we got was a good match for the genre. Rock 'n' roll has a spontaneous feel, free and spirited. Yet the artists behind it are skilled and passionate. It was the same with the visuals for this video."
Dykstra points to the team's extensive background in animation.
"The style ended up being something that was inspired by stop-motion and hand-drawn animation, even though it’s really miniatures and live-action puppeteering," he notes. "Most of the strings used to suspend clouds or other parts of the sets, as well as the strings used to puppet the birds and people characters, are clearly visible, and that was just fine by us. We didn’t want to hide the method or the composition of the world. We loved and embraced the beauty, simplicity and human-made quality of it all."
The tools the team used were surprisingly low-tech: scissors, saws, matte knives, craft glue, hot glue and tape. Cardboard made up nearly 80 percent of all the material.
"Matt and I first really started talking about the project at the start of February," says Dykstra. "Experiments and tests followed, with the first puppets being built by Matt by the end of that first week. Preproduction continued for about three-and-a-half months as the storyboards were hammered out, sets and puppets were being built. Then we jumped fully into production by June."
Principal photography continued with full weeks and back-to-back shots for about two-and-a-half months.
"Throughout this time, we listened to Mike's and Lucinda's 'Hell Or High Water' often for tone, timing and inspiration," says Dykstra. "Though there were a couple of pickups/reshoots afterward, we finished our last shot on August 16th. Post began right on the heels of that, and we delivered the finished video on September 9th. Then, the Hell Or High Water music video debuted on YouTube at 8am, Wednesday, September 11th. We have been so happy and proud to share it with the world!"