presenting the john mayer jazz cats

I got an email last week about a crafty John Mayer video contest and I thought… was this designed for me?  I started brainstorming and remembered an interview when John was asked what he’d like to do next and his snarky-young-self replied, "I think it’d be great to play with some actual jazz cats."  So with that visual combined with some inspiration from a Claudine Hellmuth art workshop… I came up with this super silly ditty:

It was quite a project (all 109 still shots) but the winner gets two tickets on the Mayercraft cruise (a three day live music adventure in March).  I had lots of fun putting it all together.  Here’s how I did it:

First I searched for all my faces and props online with a Google image search.

I sized the images accordingly and printed them out in black and white.

I sketched out how I wanted my compositions to look.

Then I started to cut out the body components… using handmade paper scraps and painted newsprint.

Tuesday and Piper are the emcees of the video so they needed some fun poses.

Here’s the band!  I didn’t glue down their heads because I wanted to be able to move them back and forth with ease for the video.

I scanned in all my images and manipulated them in Adobe Photoshop Elements.

Then I made loads of still shots like this funny one.

I placed the shots in order and added music using Adobe Premier Elements.

And that’s how I brought the John Mayer Jazz Cats to life!