In addition to the music video competition, you will occasionally find music videos represented in other places at SXSW. For example, director/animator Chris Ullens had two of his music videos screen at SXSW this year, with his video for "Sex" by Slugabed as part of the music video section, and his "Vengeance Rhythm" video by Two Fingers featured in the midnight shorts section. We talked to Chris about the process behind each video, having them each screen at SXSW, and having to eat breakfast everyday on a bloody set.

Doug: I was familiar with the "Vengeance Rhythm" video, but I didn’t realize it was screening at SXSW because we were just so focused at the music video screening that we didn’t even realize that they had music videos in that midnight short section. Is there a thin line between music videos and shorts for you?

Chris: It’s well cool to have a music video in the midnight shows. Whenever I receive a music video pitch, I tend to consider it like a sort of short film pitch. I always like to get a little story together, as the tracks themselves inspire feelings and emotions. I love music, and therefore I love to be inspired by a track, listen to it, and just see whatever comes out of me just listening to the track. So yes, generally I look at music videos like short films, which is why I send my music videos to film festivals.

Doug: When you come up with the ideas for these videos, does it start by just listening to the track and you build off of whatever image you get in your head while listening?

Chris: Generally, yes. That’s why I really need to like a track when I take on the music video. I’m quite picky with the tracks I choose. If you choose the wrong track then you’re stuck listening to something you don’t like for at least 200 times. That kind of stuff would just drive you mad. Then I’ve got a folder with ideas that I just keep on writing. They're ideas that I’ve written any time during the day, the night, waking up in the middle of the night, being really drunk or stoned, taking the dog out in the park, or even going to the loo in the morning. Anytime is good for an idea, so I just write them down. Otherwise, I just go online and browse through a hell of a lot of stuff while listening to the track. Again, I just try and see what things trigger a happy feeling in my mind and then I just go with that and develop it further until i'm satisfied.

Doug: When it comes specifically to the "Sex" music video, where were you when that idea popped into your head?

Chris: We met up with Greg who is Slugabed. Luckily for me, I’ve got a friend, Martin Dobson, who’s working with Ninja Tune, the label that Slugabed and Two Fingers come from, so he introduced me Greg [Slugabed] in order for us to just have a chat, and for him to tell me what his ideas were on the video. He told me he wanted something with fruit. I found it weird because the track’s called "Sex", so I remember all my first research was going in the direction of something with fruits and sex - something weird and funny in that direction. I don’t know how I ended up going towards the whole factory idea.

I always liked infomercials, the very cheesy ‘80s infomercials and I thought of doing something involving fruits in an old infomercial. It’s so vague though, what would trigger an idea. It’s a result of so much research and thinking, it’s just an indescribable natural process. It’s a result of so many things that make me who I am and what I see. I find it really hard, at least on that one, to explain why it ended up being this sort of crazy juicer thing.

Doug: You talk a little bit about the cheesy infomercial aspect, and there are two narratives in play in the video. There’s the narrative that goes on within the juicer itself, and then the one that’s the cheesy ‘80s infomercial. Was that part of your research? Were you looking at some of those old infomercials from back in the ‘80s for some styling inspiration?

Chris: I did, totally. I often find it very funny how people in retro infomercials really come up with crazy ideas and try and sell you something that just doesn’t make any sense. I thought it was funny to push that concept further with this massive juicer that doesn’t make any sort of sense - look at the wheels its got for example - but still try and sell it all as an infomercial, basically. It’s that concept, but pushed too far basically.

Doug: Within the juicer, it’s very complicated what’s going on in there. In the narrative outside of it, it’s almost the exact opposite where it intentionally seems like it’s thrown together. Was that contrast something you were trying to play with in this video?

Chris: Yeah, definitely... in a way. I wasn’t trying to really push the contrast. The nature of stop frame is to make something playful but at the same time, because I like stop frame, I always tend to over complicate things. It ends up leading me into long shoots, nights and nights of shooting, and it’s always a bit too much in the end. It’s just because I love stop frame and love making it really, really complicated and very entertaining to look at as well. I think that’s mainly what I’m trying to convey - a real sense of playfulness. I want the viewer to have loads of stuff to look at so that he doesn’t get bored.

When I was younger the stuff that always caught my eye was really playful stuff where I was looking at loads of stuff at the same time and I couldn’t get bored for a second. In a way, the live action part in the Slugabed video, it’s still trying to be playful. It’s indeed very simple, but that clumsiness I find funny and playful and quite entertaining. It’s a bit spoof-like, and it’s definitely intentionally very clumsy. I always think of people looking at my videos, or me looking at it, and I will think: "will I find that funny or not?". Whenever I find it funny then I tend to do it.

Doug: Then getting a little bit to the actual animation involved, I wonder if we could get into a little bit of the process of that and getting the elements put together. A lot of that stuff I’m assuming is hand made. Do you have a team with you that helps you with that or is that pretty much mainly you?

Chris: A big difference between the Two Finger and Slugabed video is that on the Slugabed video, the budget was pretty small. It was like $4,500 or something like that. With that kind of money, you can’t really have a massive team behind you, and so I ended up doing most of it by myself. I had an assistant with me for two weeks because I realized that making it all, shooting it all and animating it all, and everything - doing everything myself was just so time consuming that the video was going to take six months to make.

In the end, I had that guy Jamie Durand - a real legend! - that came in for two weeks, which helped me a lot. I had made the first set already, then I told Jamie here’s the first set and the look we're going for, that’s the sort of thing I want to for the next four or five sets and he would make them with me supervising it while I was shooting next door. All in all, it took two or three months to make that video and initially, I wanted to make it even more complicated! But at the same time, you’ve got a budget restraint and a deadline as well. I had to hand it in after two months and a half, so by the end, I just had to simplify some of my ideas.

Doug: How does that compare to the Two Fingers video? Was it a much bigger team behind you for that one?

Chris: There was, definitely. On the Slugabed one, there was me and Jamie (that worked with me for two weeks) and I had an editor as well who is a guy that I met editing most of my commercials and I really love him. He cuts things really well. A guy called James Wright - he edited both music videos. That was about it for the team. While as, on Two Fingers, I probably had a 15 to 20 member crew. Also the big difference is that I had $15,000 to make the video, but I had only a month to do it. For the Two Finger video my concept was much clearer in my head. I knew that I wanted to make the stop frame of the teddy bear walking around with those crazy slow motion explosions. In order to achieve that, I had to be very precise on what I shot in stop frame and what I shot on the slow motion day of the shoot, for those different shots to link together. The Slugabed one was a bit more shoot-it-as-you-go sort of thing, while the Two Finger’s really needed everything to be calculated

I had a team of model makers, led by Ciaran Beale, because the teddy bears needed a bit of surgery to be stop frame animatable. There were two model makers and sometimes a third, sometimes a fourth person coming in on really hard days to prepare all the bears, all the props, and that whole room which we actually built in my living room. That was a bit intense I must admit. I ended up having breakfast, dinner, and everything in front of that set for a week and a half. Having a bloody set with guts everywhere for breakfast is sometimes not what you want to see when you only had two hours of sleep and you need to go back animating.

Doug: So was it all pretty much stop motion in that video? Was there any puppeteering involved?

Chris: No. We did consider the puppeteering route, but the problem is that puppeteering and stop frame give you a very different motion in the objects. Therefore, we had to choose from the very start what it was going to be. It was a stressful decision. But because I’m not familiar at all with puppeteering and it’s a real art in itself, I had to go down the fully stop frame route, as that's my thing! All of it was stop frame, including the camera movements and everything, except for the slow motion and the tiny bit of live action at the end, of course.

Doug: Moving back a bit to SXSW, you had two videos screened there. One screened at the midnight screening and the other in the actual music video competition. For you as the filmmaker, is there a difference between which section it screens in? Is there one you were hoping more for, or is it on equal grounds between those two?

Chris: I submitted both videos to go into the music video category because I didn’t know about the midnight shorts category, to be honest. I see my videos as equally funny and playful, although Two Fingers is very bloody and horrible. It’s the sort of stuff that I find hilarious. As the Two Finger video came out on YouTube, I did realize of course that I have my sense of humour and it's not going to please everyone. Some people were pretty mad at me for killing teddy bears. Go on the YouTube page and check the comments, some people are very, very angry about the video. Which again, I find hilarious because they’re just inanimate objects and killing a teddy bear for me is the same as killing a lamp or something. People can be quite attached to their teddies apparently! But I understand, we all have our own little things and for some people it's teddies.

So, I consider my videos to be music video shorts but then at the same time, Two Fingers by nature is a violent video. I very much understand that festivals tend to screen it at midnight short sections. The nature of the Two Finger video makes it go in horror movie section which is great. The people that go and see midnight shorts are more likely to like it better than people that might be offended during the music video section. In fact, since then it’s funny because loads of horror movie festivals have asked me to screen the video, which I find really cool!

Doug: I think in terms of SXSW, the audience would have appreciated also in the music video screening, but that was at 11 in the morning on a Monday, so maybe that video did fit a little bit better at midnight.

Chris: For sure. With all that said, I really want to stress how happy I was to be selected for such a festival. You can count the success of a video through YouTube view-counts or through how well it buzzes around - all that, of course, is wonderful. But at the end of the day, being put in festivals is for me a great joy and a real source of pride. It's just that I remember being a student at uni going to film festivals myself and finding that the directors participating in those festivals were my childhood heroes because they could make such wicked films. Now being part of it myself is a real delight!

Doug Klinger is the co-founder/content director of IMVDb and watches more music videos than anyone on earth. You can find him on twitter at @doug_klinger.