Music has always been a key inspiration of mine. The rhythm, tone, energy, and movement of a song has allowed me to envision worlds and stories beyond my normal perspective. Music itself functions well when adapting to a dynamic medium like animation. The bedrock of most songs (verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus), can allow for a solid story foundation with an introduction, climax, and resolution and this was the process behind “Saving Green”.

“Saving Green” initially started out as a short entitled “Guns for Hands” cut to the Twenty One Pilots song of the same name. For anyone familiar with the song, the parallels between it and the final cut of the film are still there, with sections becoming clear inspiration for significant plot points and sequences. When it then came to scoring an original piece for the film, my composer, Andrew Koethe, and I made sure to stay true to the original spirit of the music and the synergy between movement and sound.

The goal of this film was create a work that functioned on the border of a scored film and a music video, with both aspects playing off of each other to tell a compelling narrative. The narrative itself is a metaphoric exploration of the loss of ecological stability and natural innocence in a mechanized, expanding, and violent world. The parallels and contradictions of freedom and fear, security and violence, nationalistic isolationism and expansionist industry, pushes a story forward that conveys both a public and personal message.