Santa Monica, California-based Epoch Ink Animation and Phoenix, Arizona-based Todd McFarlane Entertainment collaborated on a fully-animated music video for Pearl Jam's song "Do the Evolution." The four-minute video was produced in just 12 weeks with a budget of U.S. $220,000. The dark, comic-style 2D animation was produced traditionally on hand-inked cels at Epoch Ink and its partner studios Sun Min and Jireh, in Korea, under the direction of animation director Kevin Altieri and Todd McFarlane, creator of "Spawn." Pearl Jam's leader Eddie Vedder decided he wanted the band's first video in seven years to be animated, and personally edited a mock-up for the video using scenes from taped episodes of "Spawn." Once the job was assigned to McFarlane and Epoch, the directors had no script to work from, only Vedder's mock-up video, song lyrics, and an audio-recorded conversation between Vedder and Todd McFarlane, from which a storyboard was created. Epoch's president and creative director Joe Pearson and McFarlane executive Terry Fitzgerald co-produced. The video, which is now in heavy rotation on MTV, depicts a dark history of the world covering the "creation comet's" impact on primordial earth, the death of the dinosaurs, the ascent of man, ending with a bleak technological future and eventual destruction of the planet.
