The Hadestown Project

Having said that, allow me to tell you about Hadestown.

Considering it is now one of the most important music albums in my life, it might be surprising to hear that I didn't like Hadestown that much in the beginning. This was a story about some of my favorite characters - I've always been fascinated by greek mythology and the story of Hades and Persephone in particular - and they did not sound anything like I pictured in my head. Persephone was too aggressive, Hades was too serious, Eurydice had way too much to say for my liking... But for some unknown reason, I kept listening and, eventually, I was hooked. No, I was obssessed. I listened to this album religiously from beginning to end every time I had an hour to spare. I told my friends about it and discussed it with them. For a while, I didn't listen to a lot of other music simply because all of it felt superficial and meaningless in comparison.

Hadestown is a concept album about the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. It very much feels like a musical and does something very difficult: it creates a very vivid world and characters that you become invested in. Often, on the long 9-hour train trips to my home town, I'd listen to every song and imagine everything that it described. I'd think about how amazing it would be to stage a play based on it. Then I thought about taking photos of paper cut-outs and making them act it out. Then I thought that maybe, if I taught myself how to do it, I'd be able to do it on a computer and... oh. Animation. Animation is what I'm thinking of.

Well, why not?

I made my first animated "movie" when I was 12. My amazing computer science teacher did something great by not wasting our time with lessons about how to create new folders and shortcuts and took us straight to things like Macromedia Flash and coding. By the time I was 14 I could make websites and that gave me a rush like I've never known before. I was a terrible drawer (and still am, more on that later), but I knew I could animate things and took shortcuts by making entire photographs of people move and talk to each other by putting subtitles beneath them. Then I started drawing, but wasn't confident enough to do faces, so I just used to cut out the heads of my friends and family from photos (very much like a serial killer) and put them on a very poorly drawn body. When my puppets talked, they would bob their heads maniacally and, if I was brave enough, I'd record myself saying the lines or make my parents say theirs on my shitty $10 microphone. And I loved every minute of it.

I'm 10 years older now, so of course things are going to be different. I'll be using After Effects instead of Flash even though I don't know anything about this software, but I'll learn. I'll learn because I want to do this right. I want to read about how things like this are done and follow a set of rules so that what comes from all of this in the end makes people go: "Wow. I can't believe you made that".