Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Masters Of Illusion- We All Over(2000)

In early 1999,DJ and producer Kutmasta Kurt released his grand opus, Masters Of Illusion. After years of releasing LP's by Kool Keith, Planet Asia and numerous other artists, the Masters LP was a sort of personal project for him. I was brought on to put together a graphics package and a basic art direction for it.

We'd been talking about creating an animated music video for it for a while, though, I'd never taken on anything as long a 3 minutes. With Kurt's encouragement, I got started and put together a video for We All Over. After about 2 months of working nights, I got this completed:

The video was basically created for the then new 'web distribution' method. Seeing this on a site like 'Icebox'(which was the go to place for web animation at the time), and watching the views top 7,000 was a huge thrill. It was way more than I expected. Turns out that MTV had expressed interest in airing it as well...

I tried to remind Kurt that this was a terribly primitive web animation (12 frames per second), not to mention my first. I was a bit uneasy about it showing to tens of thousands. Nevertheless, I sent in the broadcast version, and cringed when I finally saw it, as every slow motion, mistake, bad art, on the screen for all to see. It was a great feeling though.
It was an exciting project, and did lead me to a lot of great work. Though some claim it was the first animated Hip Hop Music Video, KRS-1's Break The Chain beat us by about 6 years.

1 comment:

Distrakt said...

This is another one of my all time favorites!