NIGHTMARES IN TECHNICOLOR

Well damn, here we are.  Today is the release of our 7th album, Nightmares in Technicolor!  

I honestly couldn’t be happier.  This evil little sci-fi horror record has gotten me through a lot of dark moments in life, including the passing of my dad in 2020.  I’ll write more about individual songs and what they’re about… but I want to give folks a chance to listen first and draw their own conclusions.  But I will say this is a record for dark times and for the terrors of transformation and loss.

And here’s something new… this time we got CDs made.  I haven’t had a Johnny record replicated on CD since… 2009?  I think the last time was our third album, Galacticus 9.  I love having tangible medium and this seemed like a fun opportunity.  And who knows… if you listeners are interested in them, I might just get CDs made for the other records.

Limited edition CDs in Digipaks available at JohnnyStranger.com

It’s especially fun to release this album while I’m completing the mixes on the following record.  Ha ha.  Feels good to keep surging ahead.  But yeah.  Next year’s music is nearly done.  Now I have to start tending to the art content for it (although we already have art for all the songs and album 8 itself).  But I digress.  Today is for Nightmares in Technicolor.

I hope you like it and share it with your friends!  The word of mouth for all of this is what really keeps the Johnny ship sailing.  So thanks for listening!  And reaching out!  I hope you find something in Nightmares in Technicolor to sink your fangs into.

'Marche' Animated Video

Very excited to finally share this!

This video took a long, long time to make.

As I was wrapping up production on the entire Nutcracker EP (think I finished around June 2019), the idea came up that we needed videos to help promote. At first, I tried some more typical Johnny things… using old footage and messing around with it. Some of those videos are posted on our IGTV. But they never felt like anything special. We talked about some sort of animated video, but I was always hesitant… mostly because I knew anything like that would take a super long time.

Now, I’ve done some animation in the past. My old roomate and I animated a music video for an old project of mine back in the early days of Johnny. And these type of things take MONTHS of 16-hour days, all super zeroed in.

Funny enough, the solution that finally got me to decide to do it was Maddie’s. She suggested just having a white backdrop, rather than designed a background for every scene. I knew that would cut down on my workload substantially and I also liked the idea of how it would look. So I started to dream up the sequence and figure out how to best go about production.

I took the album cover by my old friend Stephanie Macleod and cut out the primary figures of the Nutcracker and Claire. I then created digital ‘puppies’ that I could keyframe animate in Adobe Premiere. The sequences that were more complicated I created frame by frame in Photoshop. For example, the shot where the nutcracker breakdances was something like 96 frames. Some of the other puppets I had to create myself, but I used elements of Stephanie’s album art to give them a similar texture.

I essentially disappeared into my computer for a few months, taking it one shot at a time. I have two monitors set up on my desk and I had The Office running most all the time. Definitely ran through the entire 9-season run and then some.

But thank God it’s finally out and everyone can see it.

One final thought… working on this video was really eye-opening in the way that I saw that animation can continue to be a big focus for JS, albeit in different ways. So, you can expect more. I already have plans for the first single off the next album and an idea for the follow record as well. So yeah. Lots more deep dives en route.