The making of "Wanderland"

Hermanos Ingleso are Belgium brothers, and an electronic music duo.  I recently stumbled upon this deadly tune "Wanderland", but I was even more impressed with the video, which was recently awarded "Best Belgian Music Video 2010" at the International Film Festival Leuven. 

In fact, I liked it so much that I dropped the directors, Kristof Luyckx & Michèle Vanparys, a line and asked them a few questions!

God bless Vimeo - it makes it so easy to connect with film makers whose work you like :D (Interview below the video)

- What was your creative inspiration for the video?

Kristof:  The album artwork of Hermanos Inglesos contained birds (from encyclopedia books), so I took this as a starting point.

The title 'Wanderland' and lyrics like 'take me to your dreams' inspired me to find an idea so we could show lots of "dream sequences". Or in this case a psychedelic trip. I had the idea of 'birds doing drugs', and then letting them hallucinate and have a bad trip and then an overdose. But because the song is rather positive and sweet, we decided to soften the idea and make it more suggestive. Hence the "magic berry".

Michèle:  Kristof was going mad with the delirious drugged bird :)

I knew Hermanos  would find this maybe a bit too much, so we softened it down.

And afterwards I think this was a better thing for the storyline.. 

How did you go about planning and making it?

Kristof:  Hermanos Inglesos approached Michèle. We had about 1,5 month to make the video. We had creative freedom, the only thing they asked was to include the two musicians. But we spoke with Hermanos Inglesos about the idea/style before executing the storyboard. And after getting the storyboard/animatic approved, we continued designing and animating.

It was very low-budget (like most music videos), but we did this for our portfolio and self-promotion (and do enough commercial work to compensate).

Michèle:  Hermanos contacted me, because they had seen a little test movie on my blog and they liked the `girly sweetness` in it ..  but they had no idea what they wanted to make... "something with birds" ..!

They had almost no budget either, so we had to come up with a style that was easy and quick, also because of the short deadline..

So I called kristof, who i`d knew as a great illustrator and graphic designer/motion graphics animator ..

and he was immediately enthusiastic, even do we didn`t really knew each other and i don`t think he really knew my work.

Because I had no time to work on it and we had the deadline ahead he started with the main idea and made the main style of the movie..

- What motivated you to work together, and what do you think the ingredients for a valuable partnership are?

Kristof:  Michèle asked me if I had time and wanted to direct the video. We knew each other, but haven't worked together before. But it went very well, we both concluded afterwards.

Michèle:  I liked his graphic style, very minimal.  And i had never directed a movie by myself (exept my graduation project) 

so, with the deadline and the opportunity that we could make  whatever we liked, 

I thought getting someone like Kristof on this project would make it .. better :)

And  once we went to a guitar movie together, so i knew, he had my kind of taste in music :) very important if you work together!

Michèle and Kristof are both based in Ghent, Belgium.  Anticipating great things from both of them in the future!  Check out more of their work here:

http://www.kristofluyckx.be

http://www.michelevanparys.com/

CREDITS:  Music video for Hermanos Inglesos feat. MeMe (Wanderland).

Directed by Kristof Luyckx & Michèle Vanparys.

Design: Kristof Luyckx & Michèle Vanparys

Art Direction: Kristof Luyckx

Editing: Stijn Deconinck & Kristof Luyckx

Animation: Michèle Vanparys, Michélé De Feudis, Dries Bastiaensen & Kristof Luyckx.