Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon 50th Anniversary Release Competition: Money Music Video Animation

Animating Money

Money is an ironic take on the rock star lifestyle, made in Pink Floyd’s early years, 1973, when they couldn’t have guessed how legendary tracks on The Dark Side of the Moon album would become and remain. The story of my animation is one of alienation, dead-end jobs, the gig economy and the threat of homelessness.
I wanted to capture a nostalgic look back at the creative unity between all the band members while making the album over the course of a year. In particular I wanted shots of David and Roger playing together, before it all turned sour. Also memories of the grinding tours across the UK in a black Ford Transit van playing in pubs and student halls, before the era of Pink Floyd stadium rock concerts.
I’m a stop motion animator, using only craft methods to create effects and digitally blending them later. I could have saved time by using digital methods, such as drawing with a digital pen on a graphics tablet, but my choice has always been to use real life watercolour pens and paint brushes. One disadvantage is that paint tends go ‘blobby’ on glass, perspex and acetate, so sometimes I needed to add soap to encourage the colours to spread.
My animation style is painterly, sketching rough portraits of band members from archive footage and interspersing present day footage of rich and poor, focusing on the dilemma of young people to ‘get a good job’ while drones and automation are transforming the jobs market.
I read books about the early years such as Images of Pink Floyd in 100 objects by Glenn Povey and I watched online interviews with Roger Waters, Dave Gilmour, Richard Wright and Nick Mason. I went to see Pink Floyd documentaries: Squaring the Circle [about Storm and Hypgnosis’ LP covers] and Have you Got it Yet [a film about Syd Barrett].
The style I adopted reflects the prism on the album cover, translucent, neon-like colours against a black background. I wanted to personalise it with images of the band and everyday images of young people in my home town. I toured the streets of Bristol to record videos of young people at work and on the street, such as Adrian, the Big Issue seller.
Reviewing the footage, I was struck by how people walk around and past musicians and beggars on the street, as if they were invisible. I illustrated this by using ‘a wipe’ in which a passer-by wipes out the person behind.
I painted Pink Floyd’s black Ford Transit van, first launched in 1973, the pig over Battersea Power Station and Nick Mason’s Ferrari. I went back in time to pre-decimal days for the £/s/d cash register. I’ve always loved Richard Parry’s sax solo and Dave Gilmour’s guitar solo so I created a sense of the light shows that played behind the band.
I developed a unique style painting on a light box and recording the images with a rostrum camera. I experimented with oils, acrylics and watercolour paints before settling on watercolour pens in order to create the translucent effect I was after. I combined watercolour pens, inks and paints and then reversed the colours in Adobe AfterEffects to match the album cover style. I keyed out the grey elements to reach the deep back background.
I shot the stop motion film in two’s at 25 frames a second, so a five-second clip would involve about sixty individual portraits. Inverting the colours means constantly painting in the ‘wrong colours’: green for red, orange for blue and so on. I played with transitions between shots so that the images would morph from one shot to the next.
The technique of painting around individual frames in a video is called rotoscoping. It’s a lot of work so the task is to retain a painterly perspective, constantly choosing colours to match the mood. It sounds laborious but with time I could animate and edit ten seconds in a day, which is close to the speed I like to work at. In this case I didn’t storyboard in advance; I worked pose-to-pose, recording images and dropping them into the draft film at points that corresponded roughly to the lyrics.
I added soap to create bubbles and disperse the colours. The medium of watercolour animation has its own way of mixing and spreading which is hard to control. During the solos, I overlaid several layers of animation to simulate depth.
All the shots were recorded using Dragonframe software and edited in Adobe AfterEffects.
The techniques I have developed are accessible to all animators with a smartphone and a free-to-download app. With a simple stand and a mirror, silver foil or white paper, it’s possible to take multiple shots of paint dispersing on a sheet of glass, perspex are acetate. The technique of rotoscoping needs software that will display a reference video frame by frame to make it easier to match the original images.

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