Making Hey

We just put out a new (partly) animated video for Just A Band! It's called "Hey." Wilberforce “Boflo” Kangwana and Betty Katunge star in a twisted tale of love gone horribly wrong.

For the concept, we were originally going to do a different take on the song, which is about someone who really misses his girlfriend. We were going to build little sets and have Boflo go travelling around different places, always thinking of Betty. When the time came to shoot it, though, we flipped it almost entirely and turned it into an episode of the Twilight Zone.

To help with planning out projects, I got a couple of nifty noticeboards so that now I can much more easily sort out the mess of ideas when I’m working on something. That really helps because of all the little scribbles I do on little papers all over the place.


Here’s some sections of the storyboard, including a scene we never shot:


Construction: Boflo is made out of an old pair of trousers, stuffed with anything I could find. (I had to get reacquainted with needlework for this! And you don’t even want to know the shops I had to go to to find puppet eyes. And the hoodie came from a stall that sold kids' clothes... Hunting down all this stuff was actually a lot of fun, and makes me want to use construction in animation, instead just drawing stuff all the time...)



By the time we were done with the day of shooting, Boflo really looked it. :( Here’s some pictures from the shoot, which was done in our house. Friends checked in to observe, and there was a lot of outtake-worthy silliness. It’s really weird how Boflo would come alive, like, we didn’t change his face or anything but when we wanted him sad he’d be sad and when we wanted him scared he’d be scared. Bizarre...


Then it was time for animation! I got to sit down and try to do some of the rough-edged, straight-ahead animation I had wanted to do since I got my tablet. Also, I got to do silly drawings and use lovehearts, which is a very cheap thrill, but hey... Jimmy put it all together in AfterEffects, then came editing sessions and last minute reshoots. We finished it only hours before its TV premiere!

This was some of the most fun I’ve had on a JAB project thus far, I think because everyone was involved in some way, pulling strings and holding up things in the background, it was very collaborative and lighthearted. There’s a lot of cool puppet videos out there but hopefully this one packs enough punch to grab people by the scruff of the neck and get them hitting Replay.




And here it is! Enjoy. And then let us know what you think.