Move It To The Beat Now...

Hello there, and welcome to Kenyanimation Music TV! A special edition of our blog where we'll treat you to what has gone before in animated music videos in the region...

It's all still a pretty new thing, but we're seeing more and more use of animations in the background of certain videos. Such as this one, featuring a mix of live action with cartoon characters; it's pretty cool and funny...



That was "Waria" by Roba featuring KJ. The artwork for this one was created by Fozi. KJ is also a comedian and cartoonist, and has expressed an interest in animation, I guess that influenced the decision to add some cartoon dancing girls. Now that he's taken up politics, I don't know if we'll ever see any animated cartoons by KJ, but Fozi is still around... And it might be a good thing to have a cartoonist politician. (Might inject some humour into the proceedings...)

Videos are a very cool form that allows and even encourages you to take liberties with style and structure, and so it's kind of sad that they haven't been really explored by local musicians, as such. But on the other hand they cost money, and often people don't want to take the risk of alienating their audience by doing something that they might not respond well to. Not everyone enjoys this more experimental stuff.

Personally, I really like looking at something that was "handcrafted", to me it's like it humanizes the screen. (I tend to favour 2D and those really cool styles of 3D that really have that textured feel, things that look natural. And I actually like it when the animator visibly changes in the middle of a scene! That's pretty cool, you can't get that in live action.) And ofcourse there's the fact that animation is SO flexible, it can take you anywhere as a viewer, and I usually expect it to. And the styles you can create! Man, cartoons are just the way to go.

This post came about because of some conversations about Iwinyo where people referred to it as Kenya's first animated video. It's not! Here it is: Wakimbizi's Mariko. This video was pretty popular. But maybe not in the way the artists would have liked...



We just had to show Mariko! Hehe. I wonder what happened to Wakimbizi? The video looks pretty amateur but on the other hand you see a lot of rough-hewn stuff like this online, to some points of view, it's a valid style. I guess the ultimate test is the audience, will they "get the joke" or will they rubbish your efforts? (Like when the maid accidentally throws out the piece of modern art, mistaking it for a warm-up doodle.) Or will it be obvious that the artist just lacked certain skills?

We'll try hunt down all the people who made these videos and sit them down for short interviews. We will also find more videos!!! And as always we await your comments, critique and so forth.

Well, I hope you enjoyed the show! See you next time on K-MTV! The station that rocks the Animation Nation...

My First Post

I have always asked myself why animation is dear to me. Is it because of the freedom to do your own thing, where the only limiting factor is your creativity. Or maybe it’s because of the attachment one feels after a gazillion hours of manipulating polygons. The animations become like your children, disobeying your every command until they finally grow disjointed bits of colour in your head to things/individuals (I use this in the loosest of contexts) which can be explained to people without the use of frantic hand gestures. If there was a way of directly placing your figments of imagination onto paper, film or whatever medium you choose, there would be no hair pulling, cat kicking or any other forms of stress relief. But the question rises, would you feel the same affection for your work? Then I realised something, the time you put into it doesn't matter. There's stuff I’ve been working on for the last three years (there's seems to be no end in sight) and there's stuff I’ve done in a day or two and my attachment to it is no less.

Since it was my first post, its kind of short, but as compensation (I hope) I put up pics of some of my stuff. Enjoy…

Iwinyo Piny

Late last year we finally completed making Iwinyo Piny, which was Just a Band's first video. It had taken us a really long time to make it, especially considering that it was just myself and Jolly Jim Chuchu working on the visuals... We tried to do someting interesting. The animation wasn't going to be the most lavish, so we thought we'd better dazzle the audience with some crazy ideas/designs. Apparently, we may have gone too far...


The phrase "Iwinyo Piny" means "you move the world." The song itself doesn't have much else by way of words, so we had space to play around with that idea. I wouldn't want to describe too much of what we were thinking when we came up with the images, because I'd much rather hear what you guys think it's all about. The interpretations I've heard so far have been so much more interesting than our own that I'm getting into the whole "Leave things open to interpretation" thing...


I did the character stuff in Flash, and Jim did all the other visuals in After Effects. Most of the photographs had been taken previously, without this particular project in mind, although some new ones were taken once we started. Then we sat down to edit it all together in Premiere.



The most interesting stuff happened once it was finally finished, though. We sent this off to the local TV stations, and we got an interesting comment from one Programme Manager: Apparently, it's 5 years ahead of it's time, in terms of what people are doing with music and videos locally, and so would alienate his audience. In short, he won't show it.

And so I wanted to open up the discussion: Do you guys think we went too far? Is this some incomprehensible madness set to nasty music? Does it just totally mess with what people associate East Africa with? (And would that be such a bad thing?) What do you think? You can watch the video here.



P.S. It's not all bad, the video has been shown on local TV and on Channel O (!) and we are planning more animated videos for Just a Band. So if you like it, stay tuned...

-Daniel. Yeah, I know it says "Posted by Bint", long story... :S