You are now watching: The Keen Yellow Planet

This is a music video for Stina Nordenstam’s song “Keen Yellow Planet.”

I’m really proud of this little music video and am thrilled to finally present it here.

This entire short was produced for $7,500 as a commission by Stina Nordenstam’s label. They made videos for her entire album, mine was the only one that used animation. This was hand drawn animation, inked and painted in Photoshop and composited in After Effects. It was a low budget labor of love for my small crew, including animators Jenny Walsh and Cameron Baity. Incidentally, after completing this film, a friend pointed out that it was really about how crushed I was when I saw the Phantom Menace for the first time. He’s totally right but at the time, I had no idea that was what the film I was making was all about…

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CREDITS

Director: Mark Osborne

Music: Stina Nordenstam

Producers: Mark Osborne, Janet Haase, Scott Flor

Production Coordinator: Myra Spence

Animation: Jenny Walsh, Cameron Baity

Animation Director: Jenny Walsh

Character Design: Cameron Baity, Paul Tibbit

Additional Animation: Kenji Ono

After Effects Compositor: Dan Everson, Scott Ulrich

Production Assistant, Mandy Siu

Sound Designer, Shawn Patterson, Ben Decter

Flame Color Correction, Kim Harper @ Somersault

“Keen Yellow Planet,” From the album, “Welcome To Happiness,” Performed by Stina Nordenstam, Courtesy of Independente Limited ©2001

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Excerpt from Interview on Wired.com: In Keen Yellow Planet, a boy dreams he is visited by a wondrous singing yellow creature.  However, when he goes to visit the creature’s planet he finds that appearances can be deceiving. He sees the creature sing before thousands of people in a giant stadium, but it is not the same as how he remembered it.

“Keen Yellow Planet to me is about this little kid who’s dreaming of going to a Disneyland,” he [Osborne] said. “Dreaming of this ultimate experience, and his little life has led up to this experience, and he can’t even sleep. But he goes, and it’s this big giant lame robot that’s all rusty. His fantasy and his imagination of it is much more grand … it’s that moment, that loss of innocence,” Osborne said.

…Keen Yellow Planet’s high-quality visuals don’t betray its low-budget production techniques. It was made for only $7,500, using hand-drawn cell animation that was scanned into Photoshop. It was composited and animated in After Effects on a Macintosh G4.

To read the entirety of the interview on Wired.com, click HERE

To learn more about musician Stina Nordenstam, visit her official website, click HERE

The keen yellow planet
Bleeding out into the night
Hidden ocean of longing
Now tell me that this is right…