Gotye Easy Way Out On-Stage Visuals [2011]
Client: Gotye (Wally de Backer)
Directors: Eddie White & Benjamin Drake
In 2011 Australian music artist Gotye was set to release the multi-award winning album Making Mirrors and take it on an international live tour. Every track would be accompanied by projection visuals featuring its corresponding music video. One track, ‘Easy Way Out’, had a music video that would still be in production when the tour kicked off. In order to fill this gap Gotye approached writer-director Eddie White, of the People’s Republic of Animation studio in Adelaide, to direct stage visuals. Eddie, who I had worked with on his short film The Cat Piano [2009], reached out to me and proposed we team up.
What followed was an intense few weeks of concept, animation and editing resulting in an evocative little two minute science-fiction music video that provided an alternate interpretation of the track, and got to follow Gotye screening at venues all around the world.
Cast and crew.
Revised Concept
At this time I happened to be flicking through an artbook called ‘AKIRA Club’, a hardcover collection of Otomo Katsuhiro’s cover art for the manga volumes of AKIRA. So I sketched up a character who was a bit of a blend of Shotaro Kaneda and Tetsuo Shima.
Originally, this character that I was calling Djak (pronounced ‘Jack’) in filenames, was going to be running away from a colossal kaiju lumbering towards him in a constant loop. We knew were shooting for stage visuals, and not a music video per se, so it wasn’t expected that the piece would have any story.
But then again, we thought, why not?
Initial Concept
The first draft concept involved cute characters comped into some warm home movie VHS footage from the 90s, provided by one of Ed’s friends. I was all for it, but it wasn’t the right flavour for the track and out of scope for the time and budget.
Story
I fleshed out an idea in which the antagonist was not a rampaging monster, but a sinister force of invading aliens. Against this backdrop Djak, a man struggling with a deteriorating mental state barely held together with pharmaceuticals, would run through a city searching for his girlfriend Boram, amongst fatalistic or religiously hysterical crowds of people awaiting the end of human civilisation on Earth. At the time I was sharing an office space with crates of silkworm larvae (long story). The sound of their relentless munching on mulberry leaves bored its way into my brain and the aliens naturally took on some of their attributes. I started calling them the Witjetans, named after Australia’s famous witchetty (witjuti) grubs.
The twist? Djak’s feverish sprint to escape the clutches of the alien force that looms in the sky above the city is, in reality, all occurring on a treadmill in an alien laboratory where he is already very much in their clutches. His search for Boram is actually Boram reaching out, telepathically, to him in order to lead him out of the labyrinth of their sinister psychological probing.
Animatic
These initial rough cuts got a lot of the cornball ideas out of the system, but also reveal some cool ideas that didn’t make the final edit for lack of time and energy, especially the more elaborate introductory shots of Djak running past the various citizens looking up at the alien mothership.
Cutting together a very loose and rough animatic like this, without labouring the storyboards, was a great way to get a feel for the piece as early as possible and find ways to tighten and enhance the story. For instance, in the first cut we started off in the laboratory and entered Djak’s mind from there. The logical, and more exciting, step from there was to reverse the order and start off inside Djak’s mind and work our way out, revealing the aliens at the end as a horrific twist.
End Result
While it was definitely finished-not-perfect it looked great in situ, and positive feedback from Wally and his bandmembers put to rest any lingering regrets I had over what might have been!
And it was wild to see the clip pop up later in footage of the live sets of Making Mirrors in venues around the world, particularly at Coachella 2012, which became notorious for use of a controversial performing hologram of Tupac Shakur. I had the chance to see it live and meet Gotye himself when he played at the Brisbane Powerhouse.
Online audiences received it pretty positively too! Especially fans of a 00’s YouTube horror series called Marble Hornets. As it turned out, Djak accidentally ended up looking a lot like the showrunner Tim Sutton. Certain other synchronicities in the song lyrics had Marble Hornets fans convinced the entire clip was a reference.