‘Superjail!’ Creator Christy Karacas On Making The “Guzzle Blood” Music Video For Fellow RISD Alumni Les Savy Fav
Adult animation superstar Christy Karacas and indie animator Luca Depardon teamed up to create the new music video for Les Savy Fav’s “Guzzle Blood,” which features an epic blood- and oil-soaked war between cats and robots.
All parties involved have close ties to the Rhode Island School of Design. Karacas and Depardon currently teach at the school, and Karacas met the members of the band when all of them were there students, decades ago. Those ties have endured in the years since and resulted in the “Guzzle Blood” video, available on Youtube now.
We recently caught up with Karacas and Depardon to discuss the video’s origins, mixing techniques, working on a tight timeline, and collaborating with old friends.
Cartoon Brew: How did you guys get involved with this video?
Christy Karacas: I went to college (Rhode Island School of Design – RISD) with the band. I saw their first show at Carr Haus, the student-run coffee shop. I vividly remember seeing their first show with Lightning Bolt and Thee Hydrogen Terrors. It was an amazing show and I was instantly a huge fan. It’s also funny because we were almost all in FAV (Film/Animation/Video) at RISD, and we were also all in a bunch of bands over the years, so we’ve known each other for a long time. But when I first saw them, I didn’t know them. I just thought they were cool, and I was a huge fan of their music and live shows. It blows my mind thinking back to that time and now being friends with them and getting to work with them all this time later. I would have never imagined this years ago, so it was pretty special for me.
Anyways… 25+ years later, we’re all still friends, and they asked me if I wanted to do a music video for them, and I was like, ‘Uh…yeah, duh..’ Even though we’re all friends, they really are one of my favorite bands, so I had to say yes.
Luca Depardon: Christy and I are teaching colleagues in the animation department at RISD. Before I came on board, Christy told me his idea for the music video: a horrible all-out war between cats and robots. We’d chat about the video after work and about his inspirations, and I saw some of the early animations he had already made. He asked me if I wanted to collaborate later, towards the end of the short winter semester at RISD, and I got started right away.
What instructions were you given before you started working on it?
Karacas: LSF singer Tim Harrington described the song: “It opens with just a total disillusion — a loss of faith, frustration, anguish.” He says the song speaks of demons haunting your sleep and the battle for salvation.
When I first heard the song, I thought, “This is exactly how I feel right now about my life!” Since Covid, I felt like my life had been turned upside down. I’d been having a hard time with some personal things, a sort of “life shake-up,” losing faith in people, in honesty, in love, in humanity, politics, the state of the animation industry, thinking about all of the wars going on in this world, worrying about AI, thinking about my life, loss of some close friends, and what the hell was I doing with my life? Where was my life going? I am a pretty positive person, but the last few years really beat me down, and when I heard the song, it really resonated with me. It felt like a war or a struggle, and I loved the song so much that I just dived right in. It was a super positive, therapeutic/cathartic experience for me.
The imagery, the cats and robots fighting, these are things I’ve been drawing for years, and I just thought, “This fits perfectly,” because the cats, for me, had always represented humans and our mistakes we never learn from. Humans seem to keep repeating the same horrible, stupid mistakes over and over again, and the robots sort of represented this oppressive fear/anxiety I have and also this reliance and trust in technology and now AI. I draw this stuff a lot on my own for fun (or self-help/self-therapy?), so I showed the band the drawings, and we talked about this stuff. They were super cool and trusted me. I often work off a storyboard, but for this, I was really inspired by friends like Luca and being at RISD and being around artists making things and trusting in a more open approach, not worrying about locking into a storyboard or committing to a story, but more just doing work and seeing where it goes and what happens and let that process guide me in a loose, fluid, experimental way. Luca and I were also teaching at this time at RISD during the winter session and would meet up and talk about it a lot; he seemed like the perfect collaborator because of so many of his cool experimental ideas and the way he sort of played and made work was so inspiring and fun to me. He really inspired a lot of what happened. We sort of bounced things off each other, and I know a lot of what this became would not have been the same if I had made it alone.
Depardon: Before I started making artwork, Christy and I were talking a lot about how to give a sort of hand-held feel to still imagery like paintings. He had made huge drawings of these enormous battles between cats and robots, so we talked about how we could shoot videos of them or emulate them digitally. This was something I experimented with before in After Effects using motion tracking data from footage on scans of artwork. This was one way to add frenetic energy to some of the photos of paintings in the edit. Continuing that idea of having the artwork be affected by hand-held touch in some way, I wanted to use an overhead projector to shoot ink drawings on acetate. Using the overhead projector allowed me to record video while physically manipulating my ink drawings by stacking, dragging, or shaking the acetate artwork. Christy really supported me in experimenting freely with the projector and compositing, so I was able to get almost all of the ideas I wanted to try out into the video.
How long did it take to put the video together?
Karacas: The time frame was super tight. I think the band reached out in late Dec around the holidays, and it was due in mid-February. I think I committed to doing it early/mid-January, so we did it in about five weeks. Luca and I were also teaching at RISD during this time. Originally, I was going to make it alone, but we would meet up and talk about it a lot, and we realized it would be a really good fit to make it together. I love Luca and his work, and the way he works, experiments, and plays is so inspiring to me. He inspired me so much, and so much of what we made was the result of bouncing ideas off each other. I never would have made this alone. It was a super fun collaboration, and I learned a lot.
Depardon: Christy had already started animating some loops and sequences on Procreate, but I started making and shooting the artwork at the beginning of February. Christy continued to make new sequences while we shaped some of the narrative elements as we worked on the project.
It was about three-ish weeks of hard work to make the art, shoot, composite and edit the video. Towards the end of the project, we were doing all of these steps at the same time. I’m grateful to the band for being so open minded and cool while we sent in our work in progress videos which changed a lot day to day.
What software did you use to animate the video?
Karacas: We really wanted to lean into a janky, messy, mixed-media look. I did animation on Proceate and Animate, but I also animated a lot of ink and charcoal drawings and shot them in Dragon Frame. Luca also shot a lot of my artwork, and he also did all these amazing comps, but also he did these really cool ink artwork on acetate that he moved under an overhead projector and then filmed it off of a wall and comped it all. It was so fun and just like, “What can we try? Let’s mess around and have fun and see what works.” We painted a cardboard robot and projected ink-drawn acetate cels on it, filmed it off the wall, and then comped it with digital stuff. It was just super fun and loose. I also am so grateful to the band for trusting us and letting us work like this, but again, they’re artists, so they “get it.”
Depardon: Christy used a combination of Procreate, Animate, and Dragonframe to make and shoot the animation. I shot both my ink drawings and Christy’s paintings using a digital camera checked out from RISD. I used After Effects to composite all the animation, video, and textures together and edit the video.
