What is the film about?

Seratonin Sarah is a music video created for Newcastle band ‘Emergency door release’.

The narrative sees an intrepid explorer searching for her missing archaeological partner who has vanished searching for a mythic time temple, a search she may regret.

The band gave us a huge amount of freedom which resulted in a really enjoyable project full of influences from ‘Indiana Jones’ to the visual tones of ‘The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker’.

The songs pretty catchy too.

Enjoy!

What influenced it?

Indiana Jones, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (effects and character design), Adventure time (for the lovely bendy limbs), Mayan and Aztec history, Time travel and much more subconsciously im sure!

A little background information...

We were commissioned by Newcastle Indie Rock band ‘Emergency door release’ to create their first animated music video.
We were very excited to be presented with such an open and creative opportunity and went through lots of ideas including fleeing a space cthulhu, the lonely journey of an abandoned doll, and many more before deciding on our Indiana Jones/ Apocolypto/ Time travel cocktail.

How was the film made?

The animation was made primarily in After effects even down to a lot of the backgrounds being created just using shape layers.

Characters where rigged using the duik plugin and puppet pins and layouts extensively used 3D layers.

We created libraries of common animations, run cycles etc and developed original presets for lighting, fire effects and the camera.

This all came together with a very tedious but thorough spreadsheet organising the whole production shot by shot!

Our fuel of choice was Lucozade and Salt and Vinegar Kettle chips.