This week on the Rhino Podcast, illustrators Michael Patterson and Candace Reckinger, the renowned animators of a-ha's "Take On Me" video, recently sat down with executive producer John Hughes to deep dive into the story behind the making of the legendary music video.
From reminiscing on how they ceaselessly worked day and night to finish the "Take On Me" music video on time to how their experiences have shaped how they teach experiential storytelling to their USC students, Patterson and Reckinger discuss embracing the challenge in the full podcast interview, available below.
ON THE INSPIRATION BEHIND A-HA'S ICONIC VIDEO:
Patterson: "The student film [that inspired the "Take On Me" video] was called Commuter. It was a short story done in the line drawing rotoscope animation technique. It was kind of a mix of graphics and rotoscope animation, and it was a story about a guy going to work every day and coming home on the mass transit system. The film won the Student Academy Award that year, 1980, and eventually made its way onto be screened on TV and festivals, and then ended up being a repurposed for the "Train of Thought" video."
"At the time, I think the animation style was really unique because nobody had really done anything quite in that style before. At the time, animation wasn't the exciting art form."
ON THE DURATION OF THE ANIMATION-MAKING PROCESS:
Patterson: "What was interesting is that when we shot the video, Jeff sent us to London, and originally they thought that we were just going to animate everything in London."
Patterson and Reckinger: "In a couple weeks! [Laughs together]"
Patterson: "Originally that people were a little shocked that we weren't gonna be able to do that. And then Jeff understood that no, animation takes some time. And so we were able to kind of stretch this thing out. I think it ended up taking 16 weeks to do all like as a couple thousand."
Hughes: "So did you feel pressure for this?"
Reckinger: "Oh yeah. That's all we did is we just, he would draw, and I did all the mattes. I designed the comic book section that starts the video...it was just day and night."
ON A-HA'S "TAKE ON ME" BEING THEIR FIRST MUSIC VIDEO PROJECT:
Patterson: "It was slow to build cause Jeff had a plan of how to release it. Well, I remember what happened was, is that he did not give it to MTV right away. I remember MTV was trying to get in to the animation studio to see, 'what is this thing you're making?'"
"[Jeff would] say, 'No, no, no,' you're going to get it when it's ready. So when it was done, he didn't give it to MTV, he gave it to smaller distributors because there were a lot of these small stations that were playing music videos. By the time MTV got it, they were like this concrete beast. Literally, I think that the thing was in heavy rotation for like over a whole year, like they were just chugging this video, like wherever you went, you heard the song on the radio and whenever the TV was on, you would see the video. It's never been like that for us."
ON THEIR REACTIONS TO "TAKE ON ME" HAVING OVER 1 BILLION VIEWS:
Reckinger: "We're really proud of it. It's kind of like you raised this kid and they go off and do something you've never expected them to do and have this huge effect on things. So it's great to have made a cultural icon. Really. It's amazing."
"You know, we teach at USC and all our students know the video. I don't think we expected it to have a rebirth through YouTube and the web, but it did. And it's just, it's incredible. It's really incredible."
Listen to the rest of Part One here.
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