MUSIC VIDEO: “The Rabbits”

Animated music video for “The Rabbits”, the first single from The Diving Bell Spiders. The Diving Bell Spiders is a fictional band that I created with some friends in 2025. The musicians are real, the songs are written by real people, but the band will only ever exist in animation. “The Rabbits” is the first of several animated music videos that I will release in the future.

This song was written by Steven Brooks in 2024, and tells the story of his need to move from Seattle to the desert in the mid 2010s. It was important for me to include some personal details in the visual story, even though the storyline is mostly a work of fiction. For example, the house that the band travels to in the desert is actually the house that Steve and his wife built when they first moved to the desert. The presence of saguaro cactus in a lot of the desert scenes is a nod to Steve’s time in the Sonoran desert, as well as his wife’s own art (check out https://www.instagram.com/lesliekooy/ ). It was important to me that the animation tells a story that people would care about, and hopefully make an emotional connection to the characters in the story. While the story is based on real events, I also wanted to keep enough ambiguity in the storyline to give viewers an opportunity to interpret the story on their own.

Visually, this animation combines two techniques. The characters are all rendered with “flat shading” or “cell shading” styles. The backgrounds are photo-realistic sets that were processed through a Kuwahara filter to give them an abstract, painterly feel. One cool detail is that the characters are casting shadows and reflections into the backgrounds, even though they themselves are flat-shaded. One of my favorite examples of this is when “Steve” is leaving Seattle on his Vespa. In those scenes, you see the lights from his Vespa reflecting in puddles and wet roads.

The characters in this video were inspired by the actual people behind this project. I created and stylized the characters to fit into the “world” that I created to hold this story. The clothing, hair styles, facial features and even tattoos are based on the real people.

As a musician, I sought out opportunities to use visual cues to draw out musical moments and vice/versa. For example, when we first see “Steve” dream about the desert, the song makes a dramatic dynamic shift, just as the visuals change from blue-gray rainy Seattle to the vibrant desert. When “Steve” rides down the hill on his Vespa and skids out, there are a couple small details are deliberately sync’d with the music: he jumps off the first road hump in time with a snare hit; and then he skids around the corner as the e-bow guitar comes in. I actually mixed the song with a rough edit of the video, to ensure there was a tight relationship between the song and the visuals. As with other projects, I used MIDI transcriptions of the music to drive a lot of the motion of the characters. If you look closely, you will see that the drummer is playing the actual drum part, note-for-note. The bass player and guitar players are playing very close approximations of the actual performances in the recording. Even the strings on the guitars move accurately. As a musician, it’s important to me that any music that is shown visually is depicted accurately. Over the last couple years I have created a MIDI-to-motion system that makes the movements look real and authentic, but are being controlled by the actual notes/beats of the song.

I produced, arranged and mixed the music for this track. The electric guitar and bass guitar parts were recorded by Chetes in his studio in Monterrey MX. Everything else was recorded in my studio in Seattle.

Song credits:
Words & music by Steven Brooks
Produced by Pat Stirrat

Steven Brooks – lead vocal, acoustic guitar
Chetes – bass guitar, electric guitars
Pete Glase – drums
Pat Stirrat – keyboards, percussion

Technologies used:
• Blender
• Adobe Substance Painter
• Reallusion Character Creator
• Reallusion iClone
• DaVinci Resolve
• Photoshop
• Sonar/Cakewalk by Bandlab

ClientThe Diving Bell Spiders (Seattle, USA)ServicesAnimation, Video Production, Music Production, Sound DesignYear2026