Working to the Track: Music, Animation and the Limits of Creative Freedom with Elliot Dear

Elliot Dear is a multi-award-winning animation director, whose credits include The Bear and the Hare commercial, a remake of Peter and the Wolf, which premiered on HBO MAX, and Netflix’s Love, Death + Robots.

Elliot’s ability to conjure images and shape emotionally resonant moments through his use of music, together with his mastery of illustration and stop motion, two art forms shaped entirely by hand, instils a profound humanity in his subjects, whether human, animal, machine or monster.

Elliot shares his journey into filmmaking and, using a variety of music projects from his career, explains the different mechanisms for music selection and how it impacts his process and creative freedom as a director, from the challenges of working with uneditable scores to the strange politics of the music machine. 

 

Where It All Started

At school, instead of playing football and doing “cool things”, my friends and I would write science fiction comedy films, gangster parodies and sketch shows.

This was 1998, so we’d film them on mini DVs, then use two VHS players patched together with a Casio keyboard plugged into it to create sound effects. We’d dub our vocals live and play a soundtrack over it. 

We used whatever was around to make the edit sound more cinematic: My friend’s dad’s Stevie Wonder album, the Quake II soundtrack, a Mozart compilation CD with Requiem on it (which we used for a fight scene).

We just wanted to have fun; to make things look like a movie and sound like a movie, knowing full well that it would probably fail. And it taught us a lot; about filming, sound design and production sleight of hand.

When I left home for college, we’d just finished filming a 1980s cop martial arts parody called Ninja Cops.

I took an illustration course because it’s understood to be quite a good foundation for any visual creative discipline. Composition, colour, tone, storytelling, flow; you can apply that base knowledge in various ways. 

I was also making animations and recording soundtracks for them using ACID on PC. This was before I had an iMac with Logic.  

Then, the head of a small animation studio in Bristol spotted my final graduation animation showreel and invited me to work for them as a compositor.

 

Working The Night Shift: £100 Music Videos

At night, I used to go to a bar called The Thekla. I’d get drunk and meet the bands that had been playing live and say, "I'll do your music video!" and make it for £100, which was nothing even back then.

I felt, then, that making music videos was what I wanted to do with my life. I’d sit up all night in an armchair that I found on the street, at a desk that was someone’s old front door, in front of a beige PC, drinking wine and rotoscoping videos of animals or myself acting to use in the shots.

I worked on below-the-line animation in little studios as well, putting phone numbers on the bottom of charity adverts or the sparkles on the fairy in a fairy liquid advert. Really unglamorous work, but I was learning a lot.

Every now and again I'd say I could do something that I couldn't quite do.

Someone would ask, “Can you animate 2D? We need a key animator!”  I’d say, “Yeah sure!” Then I'd have to learn it really quickly. That's how I got to know the ropes, really. 

But it was in doing the music videos that I had a showreel of stuff that was just my own work, and where I was credited as the director, as opposed to my daytime work where I’d be listed as animator or compositor.

During that period, I also worked for a little corporate video company, run by two guys. The phone would ring, and I'd hear them declining jobs because they were too small for the studio to take on. 

This one project came in, and it sounded quite fun. I heard Gorillaz mentioned, and Universal. It was a low-budget animation project they’d turned down, and I said, "Okay, I'll take it. It's not too small for me. I'll do it. Put them in touch with me.” 

It turned out to be a project called Music Matters, and it was being spearheaded by Niamh Byrne (who had managed Blur and Gorillaz, amongst others). It was conceived to combat the then-crisis of free music downloading. I made short films about John Martin, Kate Bush, Jay-Z and Elbow. 

I made these videos for about £1,000 each, and they took a while. I did all the animation and compositing for them. Afterwards, some of that work contributed to me getting some good music video jobs and commercials. 

Music is a great thing to riff off. I've always enjoyed sitting there, listening to something (not to sound pretentious) with my eyes closed, imagining what the pictures are that go with that sound. I imagine what the pace of it is and think: what's the visual equivalent of this? What's the metaphor? 

 

Responding Intuitively to Sound: King Creosote and John Hopkins

I was working on a Cadbury’s advert in the basement of an advertising agency, showing the editor the music videos I did in my spare time, when someone scouting for the studio BlinkInk happened to see them.

That’s how I got my first music video job with them. The track was called ‘Bubble’, by John Hopkins and King Creosote, from the album Diamond Mine.

For this video, I really did sit in a completely dark room and let the images come to me. 

The beat sounded like paddling, and the first image that I saw was the underside of a dog paddling in water.

I didn't storyboard at all. I hated storyboarding. I completely responded to the music and just took it section by section, thought about some shots that I would like to try and some techniques and processes I thought could work and built it out from there.

I had a budget of £2,000. I made all the models with a college friend of mine and did all the animation and compositing myself. I only spent about £200 on the video itself and used the rest of the money to pay my rent in London, which, for a young director, wasn't cheap. 

 

Using The Score Versus The Beat For Inspiration: John Hopkins

The rhythm of an edit is as important as the rhythm of the song, and they’re very much intertwined. 

‘Feel First Life’ is an ambient track, so, on this project, the music acted much more like a score to my music video than the usual dynamic of picture complementing sound.

John Hopkins had done film soundtracks before. By that point, he’d scored the sci-fi film Monsters, so he was well-versed in that approach.

His track had contemplative piano and an orchestral feel where the music swells and builds. It’s very moving and cinematic. The visuals didn’t need to respond to a BPM; they needed to create an atmosphere, and it mattered less where the cuts came. 

As a result, the shots ended up being much longer. It’s got a surreal, ethereal quality to it. We shot lots of miniatures in slow motion to achieve a sense of scale and create dreamlike, drifting movement.

I still love that video. The pictures reacted to the music but in a completely different, gentler way.

It’s the antithesis of ‘Emerald Rush’, another John Hopkins dance track I directed with Rob Hunter. That was animated and quite cinematic, and so it felt like a short film, but the edit was very much locked to the beat. 

There were pulsating lights and animated elements that moved in time to the music. It’s perhaps what you’d consider a more traditional music video edit.

 

The Dynamics of The Music Machine: John Lewis

The John Lewis commercials are a big deal in the UK. People wait for them to air, and they’re seen by millions, usually when Strictly Come Dancing is on at Christmas. 

The featured music usually does well in the charts, often reaching the top 10. The Bear and the Hare soundtrack reached #1.
 
Yet, for about eight months, we worked to a track called ‘Nemo Egg’ from the film Finding Nemo; a lovely bit of orchestral music by Thomas Newman.

I used it on a test, and everyone fell in love with it. It was the soundtrack to the animatics for months and was essentially the score for The Bear and the Hare for a long time.

The music wasn't even mentioned. People weren't even thinking about it until quite late on. If they were, I certainly wasn't part of it.

Then the time came to start talking about music. I was in a boardroom with the ad agency and the head of John Lewis’ marketing. 

I put my hand up and asked, “Would it be okay if we had a fully orchestral score?” 
They just went “...No.” And then didn't acknowledge me again. I just wasn't part of that conversation. 

They eventually came back with the Keane song ‘Somewhere Only We Know’. But Lily Allen wasn't the choice for it. I actually have a folder somewhere on a hard drive with a dozen tracks of various artists doing versions of that song, including Annie Lennox. That’s how extensive the music selection process can be.

Then out of nowhere came Lily Allen. Her version kind of worked. Her mockney accent was slightly jarring against the gentle visuals of the film itself, and I remember asking someone to pass on the note to see if she would soften the glottal stop in the word “getting”, which she kindly did. 

After it came out, Lily actually admitted to not really liking the track herself. We timed the music so it swelled in the right place and resolved correctly, but on this occasion, that’s as far as I got to shaping the track itself.
 
That's how far outside of the music process you can be, as a director. 

I imagine things were in motion behind the scenes way before I got involved with it. Keane had their “Best Of” album coming out at the same time, and we were probably destined to have Lily Allen doing a Keane cover from the get-go; I just didn't know about it.

 

Editing Music Into An Emotional Arc: The BBC

When the script for The Supporting Act (BBC’s Christmas ad) came in, there was already a story about a daughter dancing with her dad in place.

I save things in playlists; song ideas for show reels, film soundtracks that I write to, tracks that conjure certain images or put me in a certain mood. 

In one of these playlists I had a nu-disco track called ‘Peanut Butter Jelly’ by Galantis, which had the right sort of tempo I thought the dance sequence needed.

We worked with that as the temporary music for ages, right up until the last couple of weeks when we found the actual track, ‘Symphony’ by Clean Bandit.

When we got the choreographers in, the reference dancers were still working to ‘Peanut Butter Jelly’. It wasn't until after everything was already animated that we put the Clean Bandit track on it.

I went to the studio with one of the producers of the Clean Bandit track, and we scored the rest of the advert. 

The radio edit kicks in at a specific point, and so we already had a needle-drop moment for the dance sequence. Up until that point in the action, there’s only piano and synth, which is also the same melody. 

Without choosing the hero track, a director can still score around it. 

I thought it’d be nice to add the motif we hear in the song, gently, when we first see the girl. Then to progress to a minor key for drama when the dad and the little girl have fallen out, before building to the needle-drop moment when the dance begins, and people hear the track they recognise from the radio.

The producer actually played the music to the picture, rearranged some things, and then we recorded it in the room that afternoon.

 

The Challenge of Uneditable Music: Peter and The Wolf 

In the early 2000s, Bono and Gavin Friday had recorded Peter and the Wolf as an audiobook with music to accompany Bono's ink paintings, which he’d done for a hospice charity in Ireland. 

Gavin narrated it, and it had been released as a sort of special edition CD and book. Then BMG, who owned the rights to it, wanted to turn it into an animation.

All we had for audio, unfortunately, was an MP3 ripped from a CD. 

The voiceover was baked into the music. That was it. There were no stems. The producer of the original recording had moved to France, and the Pro Tools file was lost to time. 

Originally, the tale of Peter and the Wolf was written as a symphony. So, of course, the audio is mostly music, and there were big gaps in the narration. 

There’d be a peppering of voiceover, which dictated what we needed to see on screen. Then, there'd be huge sections of music to fill with visuals and no narrative direction at all.

The edit was locked around this voiceover, so the storyboarding process was really difficult.

The studio ended up using an AI tool to extract the voiceover. We re-recorded the voiceover, but before we knew that was an option, we still had to make a 27-minute animation around a voiceover that was already there. 

But with the music and voiceover separated, we could move things around a bit and get the story to flow like a more dynamic film; not hindered by a baked-in voiceover. 

Speaking of AI, that's when you use it: painstakingly unpicking a voiceover from classical music in an old MP3.

Not taking away someone's creative work; the work that’s done by people with their own stories and experiences, with skills they’ve spent their lives learning to do.

 

The Music That Makes You

When I’m not directing, I’m the creative director at Blink Industries. 

Lately, I’ve been co-directing with Ricky Gervais on an animated Netflix show called Alley Cats. It is a great example of how music continues to be a very significant part of the process. 

He was a musician before he was a comedian and actor, and he’s a proper muso to this day. He's got all his needle drops ready to go before I even get my hands on the show, sometimes whole musical sections. He's very protective about the music, and it really means a lot to him. 

It's still very much part of what I do, too. When the music and its core moments are predetermined, the visuals must be designed to serve them, and then all those years of music video training really do come in handy.