What is the film about?

Bomper Studio partners with Colonel Tony Moore for his directorial debut; an animated music video for Grammy-nominated artist, Tyler Childers’ ‘Country Squire’.

Full of bright colors and lifelike 3D animation — part Rudolph holiday special, part Wallace and Gromit — the clip follows the Kentucky singer-songwriter as he plays gigs, makes it big and woos his missus along the way. He buys a tow-behind camper too and together they hit the road, grow old, and raise a family. They even end up in outer space, in a futuristic nod to The Jetsons.

It’s a lighthearted tale, with a bunch of Easter eggs for both Childers and Kentucky diehards. His guitar case is plastered with the stickers of fellow artists, from fellow Kentuckians Kelsey Waldon and Sturgill Simpson, to his hero John Prine, and his wife Senora May. In a few scenes, Childers is shown drinking an Ale-8 soft drink in its iconic green bottle (it’s made in Winchester, Kentucky).

What influenced it?

With Colonel Tony Moore growing up on a heavy diet of classic cartoons, the story combines a fantastic, over-the-top artistic sensibility with an authentic Kentucky flavour. The concept called for simple construction, but with the realistic textures of a stop motion aesthetic, landing somewhere between the tangibility of Mad Monster Party and the refined flexibility and motion in Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.

Almost all of Country Squire’s characters are based on real people and the details don’t stop there: the film is loaded with in-jokes callbacks to Tyler’s past work, Tony’s heroes and influences, and the current West Virginia indie country music scene.

A little background information...

Colonel Tony Moore – an American comic book artist with titles that include ‘Fear Agent’ ‘Deadpool’, ‘Venom’, ‘Punisher’ and most notably ‘The Walking Dead’ – most recently worked on an album cover with a visual punch for Tyler Childers ‘Country Squire’. The cover spawned the development of an exclusive comic book, and later evolved into Tony cooking up the original concept for the music video.

Being huge fans of Colonel Tony Moore’s work, and the cartoony nature of the references, Bomper Studio pitched and was ultimately commissioned to execute the film.

How was the film made?

Bomper teamed up with Genero and RCA to execute Tony’s vision, sticking as closely as possible to his designs, storyboard and direction while adding some flairs and flourishes of our own. Taking cues from the way Mad cartoonist Jack Davis’ designs were channelled for Rankin-Bass’ Mad Monster Party, we worked to give everything in Country Squire the perfect blend of Tony’s gritty, contoured line drawing and the tactile, rich features of traditional stop-motion animation.

When animating the characters, we emphasised the extreme storytelling poses, and transitioned from pose-to-pose with snappy dynamic movements; keeping pace with music while emphasising the story told by the lyrics. Keeping in with the style, the film was built to lower frame rate of 12FPS.

The production took place over six months from January to June 2020, which saw the team having to quickly move from the studio to a variety of working-from-home setups due to the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic. Luckily, Bomper were able to implement a robust remote-working system that allowed them to keep on top of all the disparate strands of development to bring the film together as one, cohesive whole.