Trunk director Rok Predin walks Stash fans thru the complexities – both technical and creative – of animating the rerelease music video for “Here, There and Everywhere” from The Beatles’ landmark 1966 album Revolver.

Rok Predin: “Visually the whole film is an homage to the rotoscoping technique of animation as it was used in the film Yellow Submarine. We didn`t have the time (just six weeks) nor the budget to make it ‘for real’, so we had to think of a way to emulate the feel and look of it.

“We had quite a few archive shots we could rotoscope and then comp in such a way as to make them look like the desired technique. We extracted alphas for the shapes of certain elements like skin, hair, coats, shirts, etc., and matted them to boiling colored textures.

“We used the same passes to extract some lines using Adobe`s Cartoon effect. The mattes enabled us to restrict certain settings of the effect to just the desired areas.
 

“The visual language of the video is a contemporary interpretation of styles from the past using new technologies, complementing the sonic transformation that the song has undergone for the new release of the Revolver album.”

 
“Then we needed to match that treatment to the animation coming out of 3D. We used 3D models of each of the band members to tie the animation of separate archive shots together.

“What we needed was a convincing 3D sculpt of each of the band, so that we could animate them, and then treat them in the same way that we would treat the live action footage. Using references from Apple Corps own archive modeler Omar Lawal set about sculpting the band over a couple of weeks.

“We also imagined the love that you’ve left behind, in the video this developed into this magical dancer animated by Eamonn O’Neill.

“We were always confident we could recreate the look, but nowadays these things come down to a near mathematical formula, finding just the right levels of multiple effects, and balancing their outputs.

“The visual language of the video is a contemporary interpretation of styles from the past using new technologies, complementing the sonic transformation that the song has undergone for the new release of the Revolver album.”
 

 
Artist: The Beatles

Label: Universal Music
Producer: Sophie Hilton

Client: Apple Corps
Producer: Jonathan Clyde

Production: Trunk Animation
Director: Rok Predin
Illustrator: Sara Savelj Predin
3D Modeller: Omar Lawal
3D Rigger/Animator: Alan Towndrow
3D Animator: Alex Watson:
2D Animator: Eamonn O’Neil, Layla Atkinson
Effects Animator: Leslie Dart
Compositor: Rok Predin
Archive Researcher: Adrian Winter
Archivist: Aaron Bremner
Producer: Richard Barnett

Roto: Rotomaker