A small primate with glassy, tennis-ball eyes and fur hanging off its frame like a shag carpet steps out from behind a tree, carrying a lantern with a glowing dragonfly inside. As it advances through the thick jungle, it suddenly trips and the firefly escapes from its cage. Horrified, the creature scrambles to its feet, accompanied by layers of guitar melody, a soft male voice and a driving drum rhythm.
This dramatic sequence opens the music video for rock band My Morning Jacket's "Touch Me I'm Going to Scream, Part 2," which was completed this June and directed by Mixtape Club, an animating and directing trio consisting of alums Jesse Casey '04, Michelle Higa '04 and Chris Smith '05.
In addition to music videos for musicians such as the band TV on the Radio and the late hip-hop artist J Dilla, Mixtape Club's resume also includes animated shorts for Foot Locker and Showtime's "The Tudors." The group just spent five weeks this fall shooting an ad campaign for the British phone company Vodafone, and recently completed an as-yet unveiled digital short for Britain's Channel Five centered on a miniature town of gelatinous houses.
"We like the organic," Higa said. "We like to get our hands dirty." Their "organic" approach has included spinning the members of Yeasayer on a turntable, dropping ink and pasta in a tank of water and dressing people up as trees.
Though the images in the My Morning Jacket music video have the feel of oil paintings, they were animated digitally, the product of eight weeks' worth of grueling work.
"Like, we almost died," Casey said.
Higa said they often worked 18-hour days, and Casey added that he pulled "a bunch of all-nighters." Weekends were not immune from work time, either.
"We love working on animation at all hours," Higa said. "Sometimes you have to get immersed in the jungle-firefly world."
Mixtape Club's sole directorial debut wasn't until January, with their music video for Yeasayer's "Wait for the Summer," but Casey, Higa and Smith had collaborated on other projects years before - their music video for J Dilla's "Nothing Like This" was created in October 2006 - and had worked closely together at Brown.
Smith and Higa knew each other from their years working as Multimedia Lab consultants, but they didn't meet Casey until later, Higa said. The three had taken several classes together, but the grand culmination of their collaborative efforts at Brown wasn't until "Chaise," a "DVD magazine" they released in 2005 with several other students.
Casey recalled one fit of artistic inspiration in List Art Center, when he ran an old photocopier with nothing in it, producing stray smudges and textures that he then photocopied numerous times. He kept the resulting images, which eventually were incorporated into the Yeasayer video.
"They kind of finished one another's sentences," said Professor Emeritus of Visual Art Roger Mayer, who Higa said was "very much a mentor to the three of us." Both Higa and Smith were teaching assistants for two of Mayer's classes, and between the three members of Mixtape Club, they had taken every one of his classes, Mayer said.
While they all now devote themselves to animation, only Casey concentrated in visual art. Higa, an art semiotics concentrator, said she was thankful for the fact that she took numerous theory courses.
"Our background was more in storytelling than in filmmaking," she said.
But her theory classes are not all Higa owes to College Hill.
"We have yet to find a place with falafel as good as East Side Pockets'," she said.
Mayer, who is still in touch with the three, remembered their time in the classroom and in the studio well.
Higa "was by far the most accomplished" in her introductory visual art class, both technically and conceptually," Mayer said. "She had very good ideas and had the means through which to bring them to life." He added that Casey "tended to be quiet sometimes," but that "whenever he had something to say, everybody would shut up."
Other members of Brown's faculty also remembered the future Mixtapers well.
Multimedia Lab consultants consultants "come and go, but they are definitely part of the group of star consultants," said Edrex Fontanilla, senior multimedia instructional coordinator. "As busy as they were, they were an incredible resource." He remembered one instance in which Higa had to model a building for an architecture class. Though she didn't know how to use the modeling software, over the course of three days, he said, she learned how to use it and finished her final project.
"And I said, 'Who does that? Who can do that?'" Fontanilla said, adding that students with the group members' abilities are "few and far between."
"It's interesting how unassuming they are, how low-key, modest," in contrast to their talent, said Professor of Visual Art Richard Fishman. Both he and Mayer recalled a 20-minute-long stop-motion film, "Camp Lakachian," that Smith and a fellow student, Bennett Barbakow '04, made over the course of two semesters in the basement of List. The two supplied the musical-drama with not only the set and the storyline, but also voices and background music.
"They always did more than was asked of them," Mayer said. He got to know the trio well beyond the studio, as well - they occasionally hung out in the Blue Room, he said.
"They were all on the same wavelength," Mayer said. "In all my years of teaching, that's been very rare."
This rapport is still an anchoring factor in Mixtape Club's work together.
"The most important thing when we're working on a project is that we all have the same vision. ... Everyone gets to touch something before we're done," said Higa, adding that she and her two Mixtape Club associates all have different specialties, and described Mixtape Club as the "middle part of a Venn Diagram."
"I think it's the technical and artistic nerdery that binds us together," Casey said.
