Rubblebucket “Came Out of a Lady”
Music Video, 2010
- Role
- Co-director & animator
- Relationship
- Multi-video collaboration with the band, 2010–2011
- Target
- A music video for an independent horn-driven band with no budget for spectacle — and spectacle as the brief
- Constraints
- 2010 · independent band budget · practical costume built by the band's own singer · effects delivered in post rather than bought on set
- Force fielded
- Dave Cole — producer & director; Nick Charney Kaye — co-director & animator; Kalmia Traver — the bandshell, built by hand
- Time-to-dispatch
- Delivered and released October 2010; its last frame became the first frame of the 2011 sequel
- Result
- Came Out of a Lady released on Rubblebucket's official channel, and the opening move of a two-video arc completed by Down in the Yards
- Principal
- Rubblebucket
Lead singer Kalmia Traver of Rubblebucket crafted an epic spandex “bandshell” — a single stretched membrane the whole horn section could climb inside and animate from within, built by hand because nobody was renting one. We animated and shot this music video into space.
That is the entire budget line, and it is also the entire idea: a band that could not buy spectacle sewed one, then handed it to a camera and an animator and asked for orbit.
Set piece: the bandshell. Spandex, stitched by the band's own lead singer, Kalmia Traver.
Practical: bodies inside fabric. Every shape on screen is a person pushing.
Post: animation — the shot list leaves the room, the atmosphere, and eventually the planet.
Produced & directed for Rubblebucket by: Dave Cole.
Co-directed & animated by: Nick Charney Kaye.
Continuity note: the last frame of this video is the first frame of “Down in the Yards.”
Birth, then dirt
The title is not a metaphor the video shies away from. Came Out of a Lady is a cosmology of origin — a membrane, a pushing, a thing emerging and then ascending — and the animation carries it all the way up and out until the band is scenery against the dark.
Which is precisely why the sequel starts where this one stops. A year later, the same collaborators took the last frame of this ascent and planted it in a graveyard: “Down in the Yards”, Juilliard dancers, mud head to toe. Read together, the two videos are one gesture in two directions — out of a body into space, then back down into the ground. Neither half was storyboarded to be half of anything; the continuity was earned in the edit, which is the only way continuity is ever actually earned.
The third document of that era is the tour film “Raining” — the van, the hundred shows a year, the unglamorous engine under both spectacles. And the drummer’s glow-in-the-dark kick head came out of the same long friendship, four years later.
Courage is creative muscle, says the manifesto — practiced, strengthened, expressed through craft. A homemade spandex membrane is that muscle at its least glamorous and most honest: no money, no rental house, no permission. Somebody sewed the idea, everybody climbed in, and the camera was pointed at the result without flinching. Look directly. Proceed anyway. Then animate it into space.
Proof: watch it on YouTube on Rubblebucket’s official channel · rubblebucket.com · the sequel it sets up: Down in the Yards.
