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About Mortified and the “I Hate Drake” Video

Mortified is a forum for people to share their most embarrassing childhood artifacts (old letters, lyrics, journals, poetry, home videos) in an effort to reveal stories about their lives. It’s a grassroots project and is constantly evolving.

Over the years, my co-producer Neil Katcher and I have been lucky enough to tackle everything from books to stage to the web. But of all our goals with Mortified, animation has always been high on our wishlist. So when we were brainstorming ways to market our first book, Mortified: Real Words Real People Real Pathetic, we decided the time was finally right to make that dream a reality.

I selected a chapter titled I Hate Drake for our first foray. I Hate Drake is an excerpt from a guy named Will Nolan’s childhood diary. Short, brutal and sweet, Will’s journal entry has always captivated me, and it’s descriptive language seemed ripe for a visual adaptation.

Visual Link

I had a specific visual aesthetic in mind for what a Mortified animation should look like. It should have the raggedy, moody, frenetic energy of a teen notebook. Innocent at the core but frayed on the surface. We called this aesthetic: punk meets Punky Brewster.

I Hate Drake

So I contacted Bill Barmisnki an amazingly talented animator I interned for in college, and crossed my fingers that he’d spark to it. Barminski is known for his humorous and innovative use of mixed media that leant itself perfectly to Mortified’s tone.

“Ripped from the pages of real,” was the directive. Bill took that phrase and ran with it, creating a lush world of lined paper and strange scribbled beings. I gave him lots of creative freedom. Working alongside Mike Hulswit and Chris Louie (who is now his partner in Walter Robot), he nailed it.

Production

For legal reasons, we didn’t want to use a real kid’s face for the photo of Drake. So Bill dug through some old yearbooks and merged several faces into one, creating a “Franken-teen.” The live action footage is actually shot in Barminski’s house. That’s his wife ironing. My favorite shot is the nighttime sequence at 2:02 when the boy falls from the tree—the colors perfectly capture the feeling of loneliness.

As for the audio, we originally planned to record Will in a studio and set that to music. For a variety of reasons, that didn’t pan out so we resorted to plan B—lifting the audio from footage of Will reciting his diary at a Mortified Live concert. The only bummer with that is that sometimes people think that’s a laugh track. Perhaps one day we’ll be able to revisit it and restore the original vision.

Since producing the Mortified: I Hate Drake video, we’ve been able to see Mortified in a whole new light. We’d love to be able to work with Barminski again and hope that opportunity will arise. In the meantime, you can watch our other Mortified videos, which span from concert clips to animations and beyond.

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