I'm Only Sleeping

To promote the 2022 reissue of the “Revolver” album, Apple Corps published a promo video for The Beatles’ “I’m Only Sleeping“. This was the second promo video to support the “Revolver” reissue, after the release of “Taxman” on October 14, 2022. A third video to illustrate “Here, There and Everywhere” would be published on December 7, 2022.

From YouTube:

Beautiful harmonies, experimental recording methods and avant-garde composition combine to create this dreamlike song, evocative of The Beatles’ pioneering approach to the music of Revolver. Artist and director Em Cooper explored the space between dreaming and wakefulness, working on an animation rostrum on sheets of celluloid. She painted every frame individually in oil-paint, a labourious process which took many months.

It was a project that I felt an immediate spark for right from the word go, and somehow that momentum carried me right through to the end. I love The Beatles. We used to listen to this song on tape in the car when I was a child, and the song itself evokes such a mesmerising, languid, dreamy state, in a way my job was only to follow its lead with a paintbrush in my hand.

Artist and director Em Cooper – From I’m Only Sleeping | Em Cooper | Project | Jelly UK (thisisjelly.com)

I began with the thought that this would simply be John drifting in and out of sleep, flowing between wakefulness and memory and peppered with surreal moments, dipping into the history of The Beatles, with everything fleeting and ungraspable. But the meanings of the film soon began to spread out, encompassing The Beatles’ anti-war feelings and reflecting on our place in the world.

In my work, I’ve always been interested in using paint to evoke thought or subjective experience – the way things flow inside your mind. So for me, this song which sways between the inner world of sleep and the outer world of waking was a thrilling and beautiful opportunity.

Em Cooper – Artist and director – From I’m Only Sleeping: Em Cooper animates 1,300 of her oil paintings to create new music video for The Beatles | Creative Boom

The film is made up of individual oil paintings so it is made up I think of over 1,300 paintings. But yeah I’m literally painting a frame, I take a shot and then I usually just wipe it and repaint next shot, I mean next frame, and the next frame, and the next frame, and the next frame… That’s my process, so it’s really old school, it’s just frame by frame. I worked really closely with the archivist from Apple Corps, who really helped me find the right pieces of archive footage of The Beatles to help with this.

The thing I really liked in terms of working in paint for oil paint animation was just the fact that you could kind of communicate subjective experience or kind of inner feelings.

I want to try to kind of convey that sort of sense of the flow that’s going on in your head. I kind of want people to feel a bit like enveloped by the paint. Everything’s kind of fleeting, you can’t really hold on to any one image but I’m hoping that what you get is a sense of just being kind of swayed or held or just kind of taken with the stream almost of the painting.

I’ve always been a Beatles fan and when I saw the opportunity to work on I’m Only Sleeping, it was just like really amazing. It kind of sparked a huge load of ideas straight away for me. It’s just a beautiful song and it’s just got so much in there it felt just like imagery just came to me and just kind of pouring out. And you know obviously you get kind of initial sense of this space between dreaming and waking and kind of wanting to drift back into sleep, but then there were loads of other thoughts that came to me like it feels kind of like, um quite a political song in a way like I feel as though it’s almost like a hymn towards inactivity, invitation to value rest and inefficiency, and I really liked that, because it feels kind of like slightly like a defiant position against the kind of capitalist view of time and a kind of you know we must get everything done, you know, it’s almost like Lennon’s saying like please don’t wake me just you know I’m not hurting anyone by sleeping. I’m also quite interested in that because my style of animation is probably like the most inefficient style of animation you could get. You wouldn’t pick me if you wanted only efficiency in terms of producing animation but I just love painting and painting after painting and it’s not about making something fast and quick… It’s about doing something that you love and doing something slow and that’s what painting is all about for me as well.

Em Cooper – Artist and director – From Making the brand new video for The Beatles’ “I’m Only Sleeping” with artist Em Cooper – YouTube

I began with the thought that this would simply be John drifting in and out of sleep, flowing between wakefulness and memory and peppered with surreal moments, dipping into the history of The Beatles, with everything fleeting and ungraspable. But the meanings of the film soon began to spread out, encompassing The Beatles’ anti-war feelings, and reflecting on our place in the world. In my work, I’ve always been interested in using paint to evoke thought, or subjective experience – the way things flow inside your mind. So, for me this song, which sways between the inner world of sleep and the outer world of waking, was a thrilling and beautiful opportunity.

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

When you’ve got someone’s face, especially if there are two or three faces, each one has to be painted. I might only manage one frame in a day. On this music video, I had to try to create about two seconds of animation a day, which is like 16 frames each day. That’s a lot. But I went through the animatic, the sequences, and broke it down to what would be easy, medium, and hard, and sort of divided it up. So, some days, I’d do very few, some, I’d do a lot.

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

Usually, in the morning, I would start with a fresh cell because the paint gets kind of tacky after sitting overnight, and it wouldn’t be good for morphing. If it gets to the end of the day, or there’s a particularly good painting that I like the look of, and I’m like, ‘Oh, this is quite a nice one,’ I might just peel that one off and hang it up to dry. When I paint faces, it’s actually a lot easier to repaint from scratch because the traces of a previous eye or nose can make you go off a little bit wrong on the next frame. Also, when it’s a face, those often feel like the better paintings as well. So, they’re kind of worth peeling off. I would say I was left with around 150 cell paintings on this project.

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

I did feel a great weight of responsibility. But I tried to focus on what I had to do rather than the bigger picture of what I was doing culturally, as it were. It was also a great responsibility to get the likenesses right. Painting is very difficult. Making even just one oil painting of somebody is hard enough. Getting a good likeness on that is tricky. Then getting the likeness right on eight paintings is even more difficult. There were some days, like when I was on the shot of John Lennon rolling over on the bed, that I did a painting over and over until maybe the fifth time, I finally nailed the likeness. But it was difficult. I’m not going to lie. And I’d been entrusted with this great responsibility for this incredible band and this iconic song, this incredible legacy… I had to just not think about that while I was working, or I would have frozen up.

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

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