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A police van flickers in the gloom. An ambulance pulls up. And a taxi drives into the night, past billboards and bridges and fleets of its fellows, the entire metropolitan landscape rendered in blurred oils by Zachary Johnson, an artist based in Los Angeles. Johnson painted 3,454 separate works in order to fully animate the video for "Waiting", a song by the Albany folk duo The Sea, The Sea, a task he says took eight painstaking months to complete.
"The fun part was coming up with the concept and then it was just kind of slow tedium," Johnson says of the process. "Halfway through the project I was like ‘fuck me, I’m an idiot.’ But then when I finished I was like ‘Let’s do another.’"
Taking inspiration from the Richard Linklater films Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly, Johnson used a technique called rotoscoping, filming footage of a nighttime cab ride in New York and then translating each frame into a painting. The "Waiting" video scrolls by at 12 frames per second, meaning that every second the viewer is seeing 12 individual paintings. Initially, Johnson had hoped to film at six frames per second, but when the video looked too choppy, he knew he needed to double his workload to get it right.
Mira Stanley and Chuck Costa, the couple behind The Sea, The Sea, have never met Johnson in person. They learned of his work from his brother Marke, who had worked on the group’s album art. "This is the first video that we’ve ever commissioned," Stanley said. "It can be a tricky thing trying to find a visual representation of a song because you’re essentially burning an image into a person’s mind for every time they hear it. We loved the way that this offered some visual space to pick your own journey in the cab ride. It really enhanced what was happening without distracting from what the song is."
