After the release of  Chicago favorites, The Laureates’ 2011 LP, Spells, The Laureates have a session up on Daytrotter and a brand new video for the track, “Robbers”. The video is a short story of the world of reality being overtaken by charming black and white animation, with a clever, vintage feel. As objects and their surroundings slowly morph into illustrations until they finally over-take the real world.

Directed and animated by Sara Jean Cough (www.ladylens.com) and illustrated by Joey Potts (www.joeypotts.com), the video for “Robbers” was shot in Chicago’s Rational Parka and at drummer, Peter Gray’s house. Born out of a narrative initially conceived by the band, Cough, Potts and DOP, Brian Keller tweaked the story to its whimsical result.

The band took a moment to elaborate on the video’s creation: “This was a new experience for us, so it took some time. From conceptualizing, organizing the production team, shooting, editing and animating, the whole process took a few months. Sara Jean Cough (Director) is a friend of the band and some of us have worked with her before in creative collaborations, so she was naturally a great fit to direct this project. Her boyfriend Joey Potts is an excellent illustrator and came up with all the awesome drawings that you see in the video. Brian Keller is a top-notch cinematographer and a friend of Sara Jean, and he made the shooting process a very comfortable experience, especially given that we've never shot a video before and we're not entirely sure how to act in front of the camera. Our actors are friends of the band and production team, and they were awesome to work with. We had a lot of fun shooting the robber scenes.

We wanted this video to play to the lyrics and feel of the song, but offer a little more than what you might interpret with a spin on the turntable. The concept is loosely based on the lyrics themselves, but I think we re-analyzed the song when we were thinking about this video to come up with a secondary concept that would work in the visual space. It wouldn't be enough to just have robbers lifting stuff from people's homes...it had to have an extra something, which is where the animation and surrealist ideas came into play. Everybody did such a great job on this video - the actors and production team were brilliant to work with, and we couldn't be happier with the result."

Director / Animator / Compositing Artist: Sara Jean Cough (www.ladylens.com)

Illustrator / Animator: Joey Potts (www.joeypotts.com)

Director of Photography / Editor: Brian Keller (www.briankellerstudio.com)

 

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