Lucinda Schreiber is a director, animator and illustrator. She’s an Australian living in New York and represented here (Australia and Asia), and there (USA), by Photoplay. Her USP if you’re giving her work, or signature style if you are viewing her work, is her stop motion animation. It has won her work from Gotye, Telstra, Coca-Cola, Kotex, Saks 5^th Avenue, Midnight Juggernauts…

…and an animated children’s story called, The Goat That Ate Time, which she wrote, directed, animated and produced, that added a number of international accolades to Schreibers’s rather impressive awards haul.

Schreiber has just completed an animated music video, Saint Joan, for Triple J unearthed band, Husky.

The brief she was given was to bring to visualise Saint Joan’s melodies of love and loss, memory, time and redemption – all universal themes mankind longs to explore.

By forming style frames for key lyrics in the song, the video is broken into animated loops. Once the style frames were approved, Schreiber developed them into a series of key frames for each loop. These were refined and edited together with connecting animation so that the video seems to be an infinite loop.

Scbrieber used Photoshop and two-dimensional frame-by-frame animation, hand-sketching each frame with a tablet and stylus. This enabled her to retain the warmth and charm of traditional animation.

“Throughout the process, the band was very supportive and trusting of my creative approach. I sent them an initial concept that included a broad outline of narrative and imagery, and from there, I shared style frames and subsequent sections of animation to ensure I was staying faithful to their song,” Schreiber commented.

“There’s a lovely dreamlike quality to the lyrics and I pictured everything taking place in the night sky, like ancient constellations. At every step of the way, I had images running in my head as I put them together in an almost indirect, non-linear way. This gives the animation a mythological feel that matches the dreamscape of the song.”

Timing the visuals to the lyrics and hitting the right melody was a 50% technical and 50% intuitive process, she added. “I think animation and music are naturally quite symbiotic, especially frame-by-frame animation as it has a movement and poetry of its own.”

Two Christmases ago, Schreiber and fellow Aussie director/artist, Yanni Kronenberg, created a stop motion chalkboard animated store window for the world famous Saks Fifth Avenue Christmas window display in New York City. It was the only window of the six that was created by international artists. And the only window by any invited artist – Saks’ long-standing design company contractor installed all other windows.