Em Cooper

From Wikipedia:

Em Cooper is a British filmmaker and animator. She is best known for her distinctive hand-painted oil-paint animation style and as the director of the oil-painted music video for The Beatles song I’m Only Sleeping released on 1st November 2022 and created with over 1300 of Cooper’s oil paintings.

Her direction of the music video for I’m Only Sleeping won it the Grammy Award for Best Music Video at the 66th Grammy Awards. In 2023 the film also won the Jury Award for a Commissioned Film at Annecy International Animation Film Festival; Best Animation at the Shark Music Video Awards; Gold at the Creative Circle Awards (Best Music Video Animation). In 2018 Cooper was nominated for an Emmy for her animation sequences for the PBS features documentary Deej.

Career

Born in Cambridge, England, Cooper works as an animator specialising in combining oil-painted animation with live-action film to create sequences which evoke a stream of consciousness, or portray subjective experience.

Early in her career, after graduating from the Royal College of Art in 2010, Cooper directed the animation sequences for Eric Steel’s feature documentary Kiss The Water. The film received critical acclaim by the British press including Time Out, The Times, The Observer, The Financial Times and The Telegraph. The film was later named one of the ten best documentaries of the year by BBC film critic Mark Kermode. In 2015, the film was screened on BBC television.

In 2012, she co-directed the documentary 30%: Women and Politics in Sierra Leone with Anna Cady. The film had its premiere at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. The film deals with difficulties faced by Sierra Leone’s women to be fairly represented in politics and features Salamatu Kamara and Bernadette Lahai.

In 2015 Cooper created sequences for the Amazon Prime series Gortimer Gibbons Life on Normal Street. In 2018 she directed the Time to Get Out TV commercial for Berghaus voiced by Maxine Peake as well as the tv commercial for Andrex with the partnership of Water Aid and in 2021 she worked with Mark Seliger to co-direct the 2021 Stella Artois Christmas Ad, featuring Matt Damon.

Cooper has had her work screened at multiple film festivals including the European Psychoanalytic Film Festival (epff) in 2007 and the International Sándor Ferenczi Conference in Budapest, 2012/2013. In 2015, she won the Gradiva Award for film at the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis. In 2018, she directed oil-paint animated TV commercials for Berghaus as well as for Andrex with the partnership of Water Aid. In 2015 she directed the animation for the film Deej. The film was a reframed feature documentary directed by Robert Rooy and broadcast on PBS. In 2018, she was nominated for an Emmy Award for her animation film Deej under the Outstanding Art Direction and Graphic Design category. The film Deej was screened as part of America ReFramed on PBS World in the USA on 24 October 2017 and later won the Peabody Award in the USA. […]

In November 2022, Apple Corps released a promotional video for The Beatles’ song “I’m Only Sleeping“ to promote the reissue of the “Revolver” album. The video, created by artist Em Cooper, featured her signature hand-painted oil-paint animation style and was made of more than 1,300 individual oil paintings.

On February 4, 2024, this video was honored with the Best Music Video award at the 2024 Grammy Awards ceremony.

Never in a million years would I have expected this [reception]. It was a very private project. I didn’t share it with anyone. When it was finished, I just sort of put it out of my mind and carried on with my life. But since it came out, I’m really proud and happy to have done the song justice.

Em Cooper – From Animation World Network, January 3, 2024

From GRAMMY.com, February 1, 2024:

The Beatles’ story is filled with unforgettable sights, and with the “I’m Only Sleeping” video, you added to their visual language. Was that a daunting responsibility?

Absolutely. It really was. And, I think maybe if I had really stopped to think about it too much, it would’ve really tightened me up. In a way, weirdly, I was quite lucky it was on a tight schedule. That took precedence. I was just in the flow, trying to just focus on each task ahead of me and get it done.

Sophie Hilton, who’s the Creative Studio Director at Universal Music, commissioned the film with Jonathan Clyde from Apple Corps. They were very good at guiding the project in a very natural way, so that it made a very natural fit into where they needed it to fit, as it were, in that big, big legacy. So, the fact that I’m an oil paint animator and I work with archive footage — it’s got that timeless quality a little bit to it anyway, as does the song.

I worked with the Beatles’ archivist, Adrian Winter, who helped me find footage; managing to place it within the history of the Beatles was really important. I didn’t get too worried until finally when it came out. 

And then, literally, that was the first moment it really hit me about the legacy — of what I suddenly realized I’d just done.

Like the experience of sleep itself, “I’m Only Sleeping” is flowing, undulating. It looks like you picked up on that, with this impressionistic continuum of visuals.

Yeah, absolutely. I was inspired by the song itself, because the song has just that continuous rocking motion to the melody. It was as though it was a synesthetic reaction to the song. It felt almost like it just drew itself out in my mind — the movement all kind of choreographed itself around those moments where it’s like [sings lyric in dramatic swoop]  “Yawning,” and then it felt like it goes over the top.

But, I don’t know whether everybody else hears that when they hear that lyric, but that’s certainly what I heard, and I could just produce that movement to match. All I really felt I had to do was just stay incredibly true to the song and the movement that was already there, and it just flowed.

How did you do this under such a tight schedule? One thousand, three hundred oil paintings?!

Yeah, I’m not going to lie. It was painful. It was a very tight schedule to produce an entirely hand-painted oil paint animation in. I literally painted every frame on a cel; sometimes, I painted and wiped and repainted.

It’s hard work, but I just love oil painting. Now that I’ve had enough projects that it flows out of me, I find I’m reasonably quick. Some parts were easier than others; doing the faces was particularly difficult. Trying to get John Lennon’s likeness over and over again was a real challenge, but other parts of it were much easier.

Obviously, lots of people these days are working digitally to do drawings and things, but I just work in actual oil painting. I find that I’m definitely not quicker at doing something digitally than I am just manually.

I suppose I want to promote the real artforms, because actually there isn’t anything that much quicker or different about dipping a brush in some red paint and doing a stroke than doing a digital stroke. If you just gain confidence, it’s fine.

How did you collaborate with Apple Corps on this, whether they offered artistic direction or just moral support?

Jonathan Clyde really helped direct all of that. I put all my ideas together into a document, and there was lots of consultations with them and honing those ideas and making sure that they fit with everybody’s vision and what everybody was thinking.

And then, carrying on honing and honing, so that by the time I got to actually going, Yeah. We’re going for it. We’re going to start making this, it was all very clear.

I did a pencil-drawn animatic, which was about, I think two frames a second, which is quite a lot for an animatic, so as to really show the flow of imagery, so that there were no questions. I think there were a couple of changes after that, but very, very few.

So, it was quite clear, and everybody agreed on all the imagery and everything. But, I came up with most of it andwould maybe put some suggestions.

And, we came up collectively with this idea of  the backwards guitar sequence going backwards through Beatles’ history from that moment, from 1966 backwards as it were, so as to the feeling from Revolver back to the beginning of the Beatles.

And, I was trying to meld that all together with the magnetic tape in the magnetic tape recorders going in and out of that. It was group calls, so I would take one and spark off and think, Oh, yeah. I remember Adrian Winter, the archivist, mentioning how John Lennon often had a notebook with him because he was always just thinking of ideas; he suggested that. And so, I put the notebook next to his pillow and things like that.

When Giles Martin’s remix of Revolver came out, it was striking how modern it sounded. How did this project enhance your appreciation for this song, album and band?

I watched it again just before jumping on this call with you, and I love the song. I was listening to little individual parts of it over and over again, whilst I was working on it, getting really into the detail of tiny bits of each line. And, it holds up, it’s so good. I do not get bored of it. I love it.

I just could carry on listening to it over and over, which really, to be honest, says a lot, because when you work very hard on something, you do tend to find yourself a little bit bored by it by the end. But, absolutely not the case with this.

And, actually, after it was all finished, we went to Abbey Road together as a treat to listen to the [remixed and] remastered version of Revolver that was being re-released, and wow! To listen in Abbey Road Studios with the surround sound, it was just mind-blowing.

I already had an incredible respect for the Beatles, and that has only grown.

From GRAMMY.com, February 1, 2024

Film directed by Em Cooper

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