"Redwood Tree" is a joyous song, celebrating the creation of music itself, so it made sense to have fun with the video. It was a team effort all around — coming together over time, with all the right elements, people and ideas — similar to Kristen Meyer’s collage art for the album and single covers.
The process:
The song was written and produced by AJ Minette and myself back in 2017. I had done a photo shoot with Kathryna Hancock over a year ago for new press photos, which then turned into the basis of the art for the album cover and singles. We brought The Made Shop on board to continue guiding the art direction for this release — which worked seamlessly — so pulling them in to work on the "Redwood Tree" video felt right as well.
While they were designing the art for "Redwood Tree," The Made Shop had collage artist, Kristen Meyer, film herself in a time lapse placing real flowers, leaves, twigs and paper onto Kathryna's photo. The concept of having my face come to life in a stop-motion style gives nod to one of my all-time favorite music videos, “Sledgehammer” by Peter Gabriel. When I was little, I remember seeing it on MTV and having it impact me in such a wild way. The end of the video has the tone of an old Busby Berkeley musical too. It feels great for all of us to have collectively created such a wonderfully weird, out of the box music video. Seems about the only thing fitting for such a wonderfully weird, out of the box song.
— Jamie Drake
The process was technically quite simple. We started with a time lapse video of Kristen actually creating what would eventually become the single artwork. We sped this up many times to show the unfolding of the twigs and flowers. Then Jamie just shot herself using an iPhone, a couple lights, and green face paint that only revealed her eyes and mouth as she sang each layered vocal part in turn. From there it was a fairly direct process of extracting the lips and eyes, and compositing them onto the emerging time lapse twig structure.
(Photo Credit: Kathryna Hancock)
