Snakeskin’s “Heart Orb Bone” Visual Album

Surprise! Snakeskin’s new EP is also a visual album! Here’s what director William Bottini has to say about it:

“The visual album for Snakeskin’s “Heart Orb Bone” EP was created at home during 2020. The three scenes feature direct homages and references to “Baby Einstein” videos (“Heart Orb Bone”), Star Trek (“TV”), and the Super Mario 64 title screen (“Happening”). The form of an image is a lot like an instrument. You might have a certain expectation about it, it can feel familiar to you, but then it’s played with a completely new intention, and it can make you feel strange or funny or sad and you might not even understand why. For me, that’s the language of images, and it’s just something that I love getting into. The wonderful thing about this is that it starts happening on its own just by making something and being curious and engaged with it, because every one of us is a totally unique person. That uniqueness really comes out when you are working with something familiar, because people can see it in the differences that arise, in the choices that are made. So when we decided to do a shot-for-shot remake of a scene from Star Trek: The Motion Picture for “TV,” the more we worked on it, the more fun and strangeness started coming out on its own. It’s in the tape we used to color the space suit. It’s in the footage of the band on the Enterprise, filmed remotely on their phones since we couldn’t be together. It’s in the 2001: Space Odyssey figurine we used to do the astronaut scenes. The idea for “Heart Orb Bone” came from a night where Shanna and I were watching Baby Einstein videos to the soundtrack of Cave of Forgotten Dreams by Werner Herzog. The shift in tone for these little toys on screen was so dramatic that we began thinking about how her music, and our selection of objects in our home would work together. For “Happening,” I made a 3D model of Shanna’s head and she did a motion capture performance of her vocals with it. I was thinking about how the emotion of her singing would, or would not, translate due to my lack of skill with 3D animation. And that became an opportunity for a new resonance: maybe it would be more interesting if the emotions didn’t fully translate — maybe just the eyes would feel real, and maybe that would feel like the song feels. And in the end, all three scenes of the album are oddly connected despite being wholly different. And, without spoiling anything coming out in the future, I will say that I think it’s because all these choices we made are unique to two people, Shanna and I, and the time and place we worked on everything, and the openness and curiosity with which we worked on this together.”

Images from the making of the “Heart Orb Bone” Visual Album: