Spam Allstars Team With Local Artist for Trippy New Video

The lively new animated video for the Spam Allstars song "Around the Track" had a long and winding origin. "Years ago the Spam Allstars management reached out to me to do some artwork for them," explains the video's director, a man who goes by the name MarcPaperScissor. The artist, who grew up in Tamarac but splits time between New York and Miami, made his name both literally and figuratively from doing collage work. "Most of my art is done with only paper, a regular pair of scissors, a black sharpie, and glue," he says.

Much of his freelance artwork over the years has been for musicians and music festivals. He often forms ideas for such work by hanging out with musicians, and in this instance, inspiration struck while inside Spam's recording studio. "They had all this vintage recording equipment. I created this character based on one of their recording machines, this Tascam 38 that lived at their City of Progress Studio."

That character ended up becoming one of his most beloved creations over the years. When he showed it to his friend John Conway, they decided to bring the creature to life. 
It took many months, but they did exactly that. They found a pair of dancers that they filmed, and then Conway — through his Wellington-based animation company C3 Motion Graphics — animated it in a process that took roughly an hour to create one second of usable footage. The result was a vivid, kinetic two-minute video, which they recently released on Youtube. But the two felt the visuals would be even cooler with music, so MarcPaperScissor returned to his original point of inspiration. He called up DJ Le Spam to compose a song for the video, and Le Spam came back with "Around the Track."

Along with the actual music video, MarcPaperScissor also released a five-minute behind-the-scenes feature with interviews of all the parties involved, from the animator to Le Spam to MarcPaperScissor himself, who is relieved that after all that hard work, people can now actually enjoy the video. "The whole thing probably started in 2011. It took a long time to make it and for a lot of reasons I've been sitting on it for a while, but it's finally ready for the world to see."

And dance to.