“When I Was Done Dying”

In the past decade or so, Adult Swim has excelled at incorporating burgeoning musical acts with emerging animation talent. They have worked with a plethora of artists, but one particular piece that stands out is an animated music video for Dan Deacon’s “When I Was Done Dying”.

From Deacon’s 2015 album Gliss Riffer, the video was made for one of Adult Swim’s projects called Off The Air. The creative director was Dave Hughes and it was produced by Cody DeMatteis but the truly impressive aspect is how they assembled nine animators to each create a section of the music video and blended them together. The nine animators are, in order of their segments:

• Jake Fried

• Chad VanGaalen

• Dimitri Stankowicz

• Colin White

• Taras Hrabowsky

• Anthony Schepperd

• Masanobu Hiraoka

• Caleb Wood

• KOKOFREAKBEAN

It’s remarkable how each piece of the video carries with it the unique feel and style of its animator, but they all coagulate into a greater gestalt that feels of one piece. Perhaps that’s due to the use of a lot of the same color palette, or Deacon’s song unifying it all, or simply a deft ability to segue and flow between them. But it’s impressive nonetheless to create essentially a sonic animated quilt made up of many pieces that plays as one encompassing death, rebirth, imagination, fear, and more. An exquisite corpse that resembles a wholly made piece of art instead of a fragmented compilation.

The song itself is this great sort of joyous dirge that seemingly builds outwards instead of upwards, encompassing more sounds and instruments along the way until there’s an incredible aural tapestry at work. It’s a musical sprawl that’s befitting this wide expanse of animation styles and artists that come together in perfect synthesis to create memorable visuals that stay in the brain along with the earworm of Deacon’s song.

For more information about the song and the music video, there are interviews with everyone involved that provide a ton of fun (and odd) insight.