In Dazed Digital’s second interview to coincide with the launch of NASA’s “Spirit of Apollo” album (released February 16th), we spoke to animation director extraordinaire, Syd Garon, director of legendary hip hop sci-fi musical fable Wave Twisters. Garon explains the ins and outs of working alongside top visual artists in creating the albums video accompaniments, channeling Ol’ Dirty Bastard, creating a Crips and Bloods West Side Story and why burning cars dangling from overpass bridges in the rearview mirror may not actually be real.

Dazed Digital: What’s it been like overseeing such a big project?
Syd Garon: Initially I wanted to do every video myself, which was folly and madness. It would be another five years. Maybe. Once we got a producer on board and started finding all these great artists and animators I moved into a more creative director roll which meant I starting meeting more people and having more fun. It still wakes me up in the middle of the night, but these projects don't come along often so I really make a point of enjoying it.

DD: How long has this whole project been in the works? I feel like it’s been forever we’ve been waiting for this…
SG: I had to check my email to answer this question because it has been forever. It looks like June 2004 was the first official discussion about NASA but it we didn't start getting going on the film part full steam ahead until maybe April 2006. The project has been going on so long I managed to have two kids during production.

DD: What’s been your favorite video to work on and why?
SG: I think the “Way Down” video (feat. RZA, Barbie Hatch & John Frusciante) was my favorite. That video was the beginning and there was this excitement about taking the first steps on the journey. Sage Vaughn and Sam [Spiegel] really collaborated with me, we met constantly and hung out and there was no deadline. It was all fun and no stress. The other ones are really fun as well but at this stage of the game there are important deadlines. Sam and I get to work with the best artists, animators and musicians with total creative freedom, it's been a blast all around.

DD: Your early work was all about bringing static images to life with the then nascent After Effects, so you seem perfect to help these artists animate – how do you collaborate and get narratives together to create the music videos?
SG: That is by far the hardest part. You have to reverse engineer a story out of an existing body of work. I usually start by sitting down with Sam, looking at the artist's work and brainstorming a story together. Then I get together with the artist and try to find out what they have in their archives that works for the story. After that you try to build a rough cut using as much pre-existing art as possible. I'm working with fine artists not animators, they might take a month to create one painting that will be on screen for just a few seconds. If you don't work with the archives it will take years to do one video.

Sometimes it's just magic, Spike Jones suggested Marcel Dzama as an artist. It turns out 80% of his paintings are people trees and we had a song called “The People Tree”. The song "Way Down" is about a woman in love with a man she can never be with. Sage Vaughn was painting all of these red and blue birds (Cardinals and Blue Jays)… in Los Angeles that represented Crips and Bloods. It didn't take long to figure out the narrative should be West Side Story. Shepard Fairey and “Money”, enough said. The latest video I am doing is with Andrew Brandou, his paintings look like children's book illustrations, but the subject matter is Jim Jones and the Manson Family. We are trying to retell Ol’ Dirty Bastard's life story with these paintings. We've been meeting regularly and trying to put the pieces together.

DD: Tell us about your early animation work. Who are your influences?
SG: I give a lot of credit to my teachers in film school, especially my Super 8 teacher George Capewell. He hammered on us, "Oy Vey, you are killing me! Cut, cut, cut, CUT!" To this day I channel his voice and make sure to keep things moving.

DD: Shepard has a very particular aesthetic: what did he want to get over in this video?
SG: Here is what we weren't able to do. Shepard does a lot with the two sides of capitalism, he doesn't always represent money as evil, in fact his famous dollar is two sided, with positive things on the back. The song is very much about money being the root of all evil and we focused exclusively on that for the video. He might have liked more balance, but we have to be true to the song as well as the art. Sam wanted the entire video to take place on a dollar bill: this was an awesome idea but for various reasons we just couldn't pull it off.

Shepard’s work has evolved over the years and we tried to stay very true to his original look. His new stuff is heavily textured and he insisted we add the texture to everything, even original works that were very clean and flat. In the end this was an excellent choice, clean lines that look great in a poster came across as flat web/Flash animation on the screen. The texture sealed the deal and made everything feel like Shep's new work.

His aesthetic has a bunch of rules or constraints that you would think would make things very difficult, in fact the opposite was true. You don't have to make a color choice, its red or cream or black. Things have symmetry: Andre Giant’s head go right smack in the middle of the frame (generally). Repetition works. We studied his work, read his book and he almost always agreed with our choices.

DD: What did you bring to the project creatively?
SG: The video was co-directed with my friend from film school Paul Griswold. I think we brought two extra dimensions to his work, time and depth. We really wanted it to always feel like moving through Shephard's posters. The one thing I think is kind of my trademark is synchronizing the sound and the picture and imagining what does a particular sound look like. Paul brought true 3D animation into the mix (I do 2D flat animation in a 3D space). For example his 3D tentacles are not something you have seen in Shephard's work before, but they fit.
The artist should come first, you don't want the viewer to notice it's Syd and Paul's animation style. If we do our job correctly you should think the artist animated it all by himself. Stay in the background and make sure animation is correct for the style of art.

DD: What was the biggest challenge in creating “Money”?
SG: The challenges are kind of the same for all of the videos with fine artists. How do you create a narrative from an artist’s existing body of work that goes with the lyrics of the song and stays true to the art and the song? Shephard was a natural for the “Money” video, he has a huge archive of images and while most of his work is paintings that are thematically linked, they were not designed to be sequential images in a film and were mostly created years before the song was written. We weren't able to pull off a continuous narrative from beginning to end. There are vignettes and shots that flow together to tell an idea, for example Ras Congo’s “One dollar, two dollar, five dollar” chant was turned into an Iran contra recap. The financial crisis/housing bubble was just starting and we tried to rework that into the video but it was just too abstract and ultimately not right for the video.

DD: Tell me about how you came to this project - you’ve known Sam for a while, right? Tell us more…
SG: My wife and I just moved to LA and we made this rule where we accepted EVERY invitation to go out. LA felt very magical and good or interesting things happened without fail. We got invited to a party in Santa Monica, which is a huge pain if you live on the East side of LA, and Sam was DJing. When we were introduced he recognized my name and it turns out he is a huge fan of my movie Wave Twisters. There are Wave Twisters fans and then there are maniacs who have watched it a hundred times and buy multiple copies to turn on their friends. Sam was in the later category. We hit it off and have been friends ever since.

DD: Weirdest story from this project… c’mon there’s got to be some gold…
SG: We had been trying to get Os Gemeos to contribute art to the project for literally a year. They were going to be in New York for some reason (they live in Sao Paulo Brazil and we live in LA) and we set up a meeting. Sam and I flew to New York the next day with a presentation and a test animation using their work. When we got to the hotel room they said they were going to get a hamburger and they couldn't meet with us. Sorry. Thanks for coming. Nice to meet you. We are standing in the hallway of the hotel 3,000 miles from home with no place to go. We invited ourselves along for the hamburger and did our pitch on the street. After the burger we managed to get them to stop at a friend’s house so we could show them animation and then we tagged along to the show they were going to. We didn't have a place to sleep so we stayed up all night, which isn't hard to do in New York and we finally passed out in the taxi some time in the morning. I woke up halfway to the airport and saw two burning cars hanging off of an overpass above us about to fall. The cab driver said nothing and to this day I don't know if it was real.

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