Quick stats about the movie
- Director:
Nicholas Friesen - Genre:
Music Video - Year:
2012 - Duration:
3:26 - Language:
English - Province:
MB
In the city of Winnipeg, Greg MacPherson makes music with his friends at Disintegration Records. Though he’s one of Canada’s favourite troubadours, this is the first time he’s been turned into a cartoon.
Creative team
Writer/director/producer: Nicholas Friesen
Filmmaker’s statement
Nicholas Friesen says:
“I had never met Greg MacPherson but had been a fan for years. The second I heard Party at Greg’s, the opening track from his Disintegration Blues record, I knew that it needed a video and it had to be animated.
The concept was to have a party with literally every person that Greg would want there, so it didn’t matter if they lived here or not as I could simply draw them into this world. He gave me a list of all the people he’d want at his dream party, which resulted in me creeping their images online (luckily most of Greg’s friends are musicians so they have promotional photos).
The other reason to do it as a cartoon was to be able to do something that you could never do in a film without a budget (I never work with a budget – budgets scare me, especially when it’s other people’s money), hence why the house floods and falls apart at the end. I worked in lots of pop culture references that people may or may not catch such as Greg’s various drummers playing rock/paper/scissors to decide who drums (like in Sloan’s People of the Sky video).
I hand drew every frame and coloured it in Photoshop, animating it in Final Cut. There were about 500 drawings (a lot of looping of motions occurred) and I have no idea how many hours I spent on it. I started in December 2011 and finished in May 2012. I’d never attempted a hand-drawn animation before, but I didn’t tell Greg that.”
About Nicholas Friesen
Nicholas Friesen has been making films for almost a decade, having produced music videos, shorts, web series and a documentary feature for CBC. Director Bruce McDonald once called him his “new favourite writer.”
Friesen works in the film department at the University of Winnipeg, where he heads up the Student Film Festival. He is also the managing editor of The Uniter (Winnipeg’s urban journal) and the chairperson of the No Label Collective, a quasi-record label.