malinda

Between Us and Them - the animation

Added 2023-06-20 16:00:03 +0000 UTC

Hello my extraordinary patrons-

Some backstory for you.

It was 2020. We were all very much stuck at home, everything cancelled. My friend, Patrick Lord, an award-winning projection designer in theater posts, "any artist friends who are wanting to do some kind of animation project? Looking for something to collaborate on remotely." I immediately leapt and said yes.

I knew that Between Us and Them would be on the album- that was actually the first song I felt that way about! So I felt comfortable investing the time and money into telling this story as best we could. We went through so many character drawings, taking inspiration from Celtic folk art, trying to capture the feelings and emotions of each moment. It took us about a year. I then premiered the animation on it's own at Buffer Festival London and Toronto in 2021 and 2022 respectively.

Fast forward to October 6th 2022, Hannah Tobias and I come up with the idea for the film. I didn't know while making the animation that there would be a film. And I thought, "well this animation is too good, I have to use it," so I decided to integrate it into the visual album. I'm SUPER proud of how that went. To parallel the breakdown of someone's worldview with the breakdown of a relationship was something that made so much sense to me for this story.

However, I always knew that we'd release the animation on its own. It's beautiful in the film, but it is its own piece of art. So here we are :)

Also another fun fact, the animators who got together to work on this project, now have a full animation studio together, and this music video was their first piece of work together! So that's pretty cool :)

Without you all there is absolutely no question that I would have been able to make this- let alone employ so many fellow artists IN 2020 during the worst of the pandemic. This project kept us all sane. And we were able to have that in our lives and make something beautiful out of a tough time because of you. Thank you.

xxMKR