I have traced over two dances from the BBC1 light entertainment programme Strictly Come Dancing. The first was of Ed Balls doing the Gangnam Style with Katya Jones. I had never seen someone do a leap straddle face in crotch move before, followed by the horse whipping that the song was famous for. That this was carried out by Ed Balls, who was not that far away from being an actual government minister, and who looked like an overstuffed sausage in a velour suit totally blew my mind. I downloaded the video and exported the individual frames from Adobe Premiere, then traced them all on a layout pad by holding my laptop upside down. 

I was fairly happy with the end result, I'm not really sure why. I had created a similar animation for the Wolfhounds record "Cheer Up" in 2013. I had made that at 25 frames per second, which is really the only way to do animation. However, unless you have a 500 strong team of animators, 25 frames a second is also a very quick way of driving yourself mad. The Wolfhounds video was three and a half minutes long, which meant I had to draw about four thousand frames. I remember sitting in front of my lightbox, about halfway through, feeling like I might start crying because I could not face doing another two thousand drawings. 

Anyway, I was moved to recreate the dance with Graeme Hall the dog trainer. Hall was surprising nimble for a man of his dimensions. I had an anxious vision that if Boston Dynamics saw him prancing around they might redesign their robocops and dogs in his image. Imagine being chased through an urban ruins by a robot Graeme Hall, with back up batteries inside his chest. Terrifying. 

Anyway, I went about drawing it, but this time on an ipad with an apple pen, so I wasn't wasting a shit tonne of paper which I then needed to scan and try and line up. I just did the drawings, 825 of them, then opened the sequence in Premiere, exported. I had a brief moment where I thought Graeme, or his partner Lauren Oakley, might see my video and reshare it online, but this didn't happen, and I reminded myself not to get my hopes up when it came to social media. 

The main takeaway was that I keep meaning to make a video for one of the songs on my record, Thanks Lichas, Thanks A Lot, of which there are two hundred copies in boxes under my desk upstairs. I had no idea this record was going to be so unpopular, but here we are. Maybe a cool hand drawn video might boost the sales. Maybe I should actually do that, instead of wasting my time doing dancers.