We’ve been looking much forward to sharing this video for the track “Alien Shivers” with you. It’s made by just the two of us and almost entirely by hand, so it is indeed a very personal project. We are both happy amateurs in the field of animation, but we’ve put a lot of hours, effort and love into this video, which we hope will shine through!
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For this video we worked on our self-build multi-plane animation stand, a wooden structure holding four layers of glass, allowing us to create a sense of depth in the images. We used the same stand for the video for the song “Emily” from Inmazes (2015), but this time we’ve upgraded our setup with a horizontal camera mount and the animation software Dragonframe, which has been a great help, making it possible for us to actually see roughly what we were doing, while we were doing it.
The video is a stop motion-film consisting of thousands of still images shown in high speed. Every frame is build up on our animation stand with handmade cutouts and different materials that we found, outdoors and in our kitchen mostly, giving shape to the landscape. For the earth we used coffee, the sand is sugar and the forest is made out of leaves that we dried and pressed in heavy, old books and moss from a nearby park. The water is painted on a transparent material called “cells” with a mix of dish washing soap and dark blue oil paint. We liked the combination of “real” and “faked” objects and effects, which we think gives the video a mysterious vibe with everything looking slightly unreal, surreal or out of place.
It is indeed a very time consuming and arduous process making a video this way, but we like the organic look you get, when you work with physical óbjects rather than digital. We’ve also started to actually appreciate that working this very DIY-way, in our own living room, there are many elements, that you can’t control perfectly: You never get exactly what you imagine, but sometimes you get something even better.
Being only two people “on set”, we have been sharing a lot of different roles between us. Anne made the cutouts, props and painting and also the color grading. Nicolai did the animation, making the cutouts move and being the one running the camera. We both got our hands into storyboarding, building the sceneries, editing and coffee-making.
The storyline of the video is loosely inspired by a short story by the argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges called “The Circular Ruins” (1940) in which a mysterious, anonymous man set himself on a task to dream a human being and make it come to life. We think it somehow relates quite well to the lyrics Asger created for the song, even though we did not intend to make a video that “explains” or picturize the lyrics in any way. Another great inspiration is Yuri Norsteins beautiful film “Tale of Tales” (1979), which sparked our fascination for stop motion animation in the first place.
Anne & Nicolai
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ALIEN SHIVERS
Everlasting friend why are you so certain?
Why do you defend this contagious burden?
Are you still here?
This confrontation killing the perfect one.
Alien shivers stalling his victory run (come along with me). Drifting away as the dopamine ray of his sun appears.
Radiant and free.
Eyes were sore from laughter.
Now you claim to see purpose in disaster.
Are you still here?
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3 окт 2024
