Synopsis

A lone Apache travels through a colorful, retro-styled America, moving from his home across the landscape by horse, train, car, and other forms of transport. Along the way, he encounters musicians, animals, and passing characters in a continuous, rotating world. The journey eventually carries him into a dense modern city, where the open, nostalgic landscape gives way to urban chaos. The entire adventure unfolds as a looping visual journey, with scenes appearing to roll around a giant illustrated carousel.

Factoids & Trivia

• "Apache" appears on Danger Beach's album "Milky Way," released by Dream Damage Records on July 13, 2010. The track runs for 2 minutes and 28 seconds.

• The video was a self-initiated project created outside the animator's commercial work. The music suggested travel, which led to the idea of an Apache moving from a traditional home through an imagined retro America before being overtaken by the modern city.

• The unusual rotating effect began as a conventional panning background. The image plane was folded into an S-shaped path to suggest distance and travel, then developed into a circular structure.

• The animation was assembled in After Effects using artwork from Illustrator and textures made in Photoshop. Three long compositions formed the inner, middle, and outer loops, with repeated sections arranged in 3D space.

• The overlapping action was partly inspired by the possibilities of the format: different scenes could appear at once, blending into one another like a moving cross-dissolve.

• The visual language draws on mid-20th-century graphic design, with simple shapes, strong colors, and a deliberately collage-like mix of character styles. The color approach was also compared during development to old Wrigley's chewing gum packaging.

• The production credits include character animation by Rodney Selby. The finished film was approximately 2 minutes and 30 seconds long and was selected for the 2011 Supertoon International Animation Festival's music-video competition.