Artist Talk - Leaving LA with Tee Ken Ng

Join artist and director Tee Ken Ng, producer Aidan O’Bryan, cinematographer Mick McDermott and artist Paul Caporn to discuss the behind the scenes workings of Tim Minchin’s music video Leaving LA.

Hear about the thinking and decisions that led to the painstaking process of making the music video with zoetropes – a pre-film animation device invented in the 1800s. The zoetropes created for Leaving LA were constructed from hundreds of delicately printed paper cutouts laid out in sequence around large discs which were then spun at high speed on record players and filmed by dangling a camera in the middle of them. What could possibly go wrong?

Find out how the team overcame the many unforeseen difficulties and how they used an iPhone to capture shots a standard camera could never have gotten and managed to tell the story of the song and portray Los Angeles, one of the most filmed cities in the world, in a unique and captivating way.

“The film has taken thousands of hours to make and has become a project that not only enhances the song but utterly transcends it. It is one of the most wonderful pieces of animation I have ever seen.”
Tim Minchin

Presented in association with Perth Festival
Produced by WBMC
Supported by AGWA Principal Partner and Perth Festival Visual Arts Program Partner Wesfarmers Arts

Image credit - Tim Minchin and Tee Ken Ng surrounded by zoetropes in Tee Ken Ng's studio for Tee Ken Ng’s zoetrope-animated video for Tim Minchin’s Leaving LA, 2020. Photographer: Cam Campbell.