End of the Road festival line-up announced with claymation film by Joseph Brett

Animator Joseph Brett has created a claymation film for End of the Road festival to announce its line-up, featuring a plasticine Father John Misty and Band of Horses.

The animation aims to visualise the “fun and anarchy” of a festival, showing the results of combining music and nature. “It’s cold and horrible outside right now so the idea was to take that joyful summery chaos that only comes from a good festival, and squidge it into a load of plasticine to remind people that summer is coming,” says Joseph.

It features plasticine crowds, musicians and animals, plus some darker subject matter: eyeballs going down slides, and a rather gruesome bear attack, for example. “It starts with a discussion,” explains Joseph of the visual inspiration. “What makes a festival fun? What does it feel like to be there? What do the bands sound like, and what’s their artwork like? A lot of the imagery comes from there and evolves. Also plasticine sort of ignites the imagination, so once you start making things you discover new ideas.”

Joseph hoped to introduce tactility to the film by using plasticine, which he says helps an animation feel less polished and more relatable. “It maintains some of the energy of its creation. There’s a lot of work out there now which takes on an almost aloof, perfectionist tone, and that can be great in the right circumstances. But that’s not what this is about. This is about fun.”

“I haven’t worked with plasticine for years,” says Joseph. “I’ve worked with paper and people and objects, anything to avoid plasticine really. It’s usually what you start out animating with and I think there’s a tendency to avoid the things you learn with. I wanted to try going back to it, partly because I thought it would work well for the tone I was going for, but also probably because I’ve been watching a lot of old Bruce Bickford animations. It was surprisingly nice to animate with again.”

The whole video was built and animated at Joseph’s studio together with his partner, Bec, and a small team.