Music video by my 12 year old son!

It all started in a parking lot somewhere in the Belmont area of Chicago earlier this Spring. The band I’ve been in for almost a year now, Magpies, was on a 8 day tour from Missoula to Chicago and we were waiting to play. It was late, and we were extremely tired and were resting in the Suburban. I thought I’d take a moment to catch up on Facebook and noticed my son just posted a stop motion project up on YouTube. It was fun and cool, and I showed it to the band, and they were stoked! Next thing I heard… “You should ask him to do a video for us”. I knew this would make his day.

My son is 12 years old, and just like most 12 year old boys, has a pretty limited attention span, so I knew this would be challenging. He was excited about the opportunity. I really wanted to do this on his own, so we gave him full artistic freedom. I never told him the name of the song, he listened to it over and over for about a week. He took that time to interpret the lyrics and draw a simple story board. He even took the time to write down transition points in the song and their time code so his animation would transition along with it.

He’s been doing some stop-motion work on a white board and wanted to continue down that path for this project. We set up a tripod with a DSLR camera pointed at the whiteboard, where he would draw the scene, erase and re-draw.. over and over and over again. He spent over 70 hours on the project and drew over 1800 individual drawings to produce this video.

As a band member, I was extremely happy with the end result. I loved his interpretation of the song and the emotion expressed. As a father, I couldn’t be more proud of him. I know it’s hard to stay on track as a young boy, and to see him finish this project to the end and to express his creativity in this way.. blows my mind. As a proud father.. I wanted to share this video here…