Josh Ritter Strikes Again. With Construction Paper!

Josh Ritter Strikes Again. With Construction Paper!

by Andrew Peterson on February 28, 2012

If you’re not familiar with Josh Ritter’s music, here’s a piece I wrote about my discovery and ensuing fandom of his songwriting. He just released a new EP of lullabies called Bringing in the Darlings, and this video from one of the songs was fairly mind-blowing. Here’s what one of the folks at Etsy.com had to say about the making of the video:

The stop-motion animation for “Love Is Making Its Way Back Home” uses photographs culled from over 12,000 pieces of construction paper to animate a nighttime drive. A team of nearly twenty artists, editors, directors and product assistants ushered the video into being. The group started with storyboarding and computer animation before converting the digital graphics to paper cutouts (frame by frame), photographing those 12,000 cutouts and then stitching them together into four minutes of paper animation. As production designer Sam Cohen said, “We had to determine ahead of time which images to cut as positives or negatives, how to anchor the cutouts to the paper frame that surrounds it so the pieces wouldn’t fall out, as well as a host of other problems. It was definitely the most labor intensive video we’ve been a part of.”

It was produced by Erez Horovitz. I haven’t heard the record yet (I bought it on vinyl and am awaiting its delivery), but I dig this song in all its moody happiness. The video is inspiring in the best way. Makes me want to get busy and make something beautiful.

Check out Josh’s website here.