Parra’s Art and Animation

Inappropriate it may be, but the music video for Lele’s “Breakfast” gets a chuckle out of me. The raunchy lyrics (NSFW) are made that much funnier by the crude animation that illustrate the words literally. The drawings in the video are by Piet Parra, who is also a member of the band. It is the first animation work done by Parra, though he is a well known Dutch illustrator who runs runs the clothing label Rockwell. Parra, whose style owes a lot to Sixties and Seventies graphic trends, didn’t exactly animate the piece so much as he made a bunch of illustrations that were later timed out to the music by another artist, Sandder.

There’s an extensive interview with Parra on the Submarine Channel. His description of working in animation for the first time is rather amusing:

Yeah, that was a lot of work. Especially since I had never animated before. Jezus! And Sandder helped a lot. He did the editing. I just made the drawings. We kind have a double process going on. I draw everything onto paper first and then I scan it in and trace it in Illustrator, so that it becomes vector. That way I can scale it. Then Sandder took all the single frames and put those into a program to do the editing. He also took care of the timing, made sure it all matched up with the beats. I would be drawing and after thirty frames I thought, oh well, that’s more than enough, but with that you only actually fill a second and a half. It’s completely crazy! That’s why some parts are repeated. Otherwise we would still be working on it.

A new exhibit of Parra’s artwork titled “Boo to the Hoo” opens this Friday, December 5, in Paris at the The Lazy Dog (2 Passage Thiere 75011). Opening reception is from 6-9pm with an afterparty at Le Regine.

Also worth checking out is this video documentary with Parra. The final minute is particularly interesting as he shows a clip from a Famous Popeye cartoon that directly inspired a new series of MacBook and iPhone sleeves that he recently created: