“Your Love Is My Drug” Inserts by Lizzi Akana

Lizzi Akana created these Peter Max-ish inserts for the Ke$ha music video “Your Love Is My Drug.” Here’s a Quicktime link to the entire piece, directed by Honey, that shows how the animation fits into the primarily live-action video. I asked Lizzi if she could share details about the production and this is what she said:

I would say the bulk of the animation was completed (from design to final product) in around 2-1/2 weeks, give or take. In total, including added revisions at the tail end, I’d say the animation took a solid month. The animation was created exclusively in Flash and composited in After Effects.

The label and director wanted a psychedelic “Yellow Submarine”-inspired animation, so they thought I would be a good fit based on the work I had done on the MGMT video “Kids” that Christy Karacas directed. From the beginning, the idea was there to have animated elements integrated with the live action, which would then build up into fully animated scenes. The desert had to transition into an underwater scene, but in the end I was pretty much free to come up with whatever I wanted within that context for the first chorus. The second chorus was also wide open, so just tried to come up with images that I thought would be striking for that section. I obviously looked at a lot of Peter Max and Alan Aldridge, but I also found Moebius a huge source of inspiration.

This is my first time directing animation for a large commercial product. I was in charge of the concept/design, rough animation, and compositing for both choruses. The animation that was combined with the live action worked a little differently–with those scenes I was asked to create specific content and gave the clips to the video compositor as separate elements to integrate with the footage. In both cases, some additional animation effects/transitions were added after the fact during the final composite in LA.

There is no way in hell that I could have gotten this music video done without the help of some of my very good (and talented) friends. Henry Thurlow (who also worked on the MGMT video) and Gene Lee were my animators. We were all assistant animators on Superjail and contributed a ton of hard work to this project. Sarah Orenstein did the color design for my characters/backgrounds, and helped me come with with a lot of the texture effects in the video (the paper-y overlay, the glitter, etc.) Leah Shore came in to help as an animation assistant with certain shots, coloring scenes and animating small elements.