Tyler Childers 'Country Squire'
Bomper Studio has partnered with Colonel Tony Moore for his directorial debut; an ambitious, animated music video for Grammy-nominated artist, Tyler Childers’ ‘Country Squire’.
Colonel Tony Moore – an American comic book artist with titles that include ‘Fear Agent’, ‘Deadpool’, ‘Venom’, ‘Punisher’ and most notably ‘The Walking Dead’ – 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.
With Tony 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.
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. Almost all of Country Squire’s characters are based on real people; from Tyler to Senora, to the full band, so achieving likeness while sticking to a stylised aesthetic was a constant balance. The details don’t stop there, though: 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.
The team at Bomper had a blast partnering with Tyler Childers, Colonel Tony Moore, RCA and Genero on this ambitious production, and we hope you enjoy watching ‘Country Squire’.
Development
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.
Character Development
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.
Asset Building
Environment Buidling
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.
FX Breakdown
Snowman explosion created using Houdini, with multiple layers of FX using Grains, Cloth and RBD simulations and using velocity advection to seamlessly blend the layers together.