New Music Video: Tot Taylor "This New Abba Record"

Tot Taylor has a new 7" single out today! This is the 3rd music video I've made for Tot's music.

This time I decided to create the video in square format. Most online videos these days eventually require a square version for use on social media platforms, so I thought why not just plan the film to be square from the get go. I also liked the idea of using a kind of "rule of four" to guide the design, as the song is about a particularly famous Swedish foursome. So going square seemed to work with this idea, plus the idea that record covers are naturally square too.

When choosing a typeface for all this, the four line font I found for 'ABBA' seemed to fit in with the whole concept and have that 'disco era' look going for it too. I found a three line font for the word 'TOT'.

New Music Video: Tot Taylor 'Featurette'

Well it's been bloomin' ages since my last blogfession; over a year it seems! I've been pretty busy in the meantime, scrabbling around making a living and not always making things I can write much about.

However...

Here's a music video I just made for musician, gallerist and novelist Tot Taylor. The track 'Featurette' is a somewhat autobiographical number, in which Tot addresses his teenage self circa 1973.

When I first met Tot a few months ago, he told me a story from his teenage years. Like me, (as it happens) he grew-up in Cambridge. As an aspiring pop star, Tot bunked-off school one day with his teenage bandmates and took the train down to London. Armed only with a demo cassette and an AtoZ street map, Tot's band tracked down all of the record companies they could and proceeded to 'knock on doors'. After many rejections Tot's crew ended-up at the offices of Island Records where miraculously they found a sympathetic ear... Amazingly, Tot and his band of schoolmates recorded a session for the legendary Island Records label. But then and there, the dream kind of hit the buffers. Cut to the present day and Tot decided to revive his song 'Featurette' and rework it as a wry 'message to his naive but ambitous teenage self'.

For such a story of retro pop ambition, I decided to make a film in the style of a naive 1970s era teenage film-maker. The animation is rough and wobbly and the live action footage is mostly shot on 8mm and 16mm cine film. Not such a leap as it turned out ;).