Show Me |
A stop motion paper craft video for the song Show Me from the upcoming album Big Starving Thing.
A long long time ago I studied architecture and one of my favourite things about it was the model making. You'd spend hours and hours crafting tiny models of hypothetical houses and real cities and crazy structures out of paper and wood and glue and anything else you could get your hands on! It was a slow, intricate process that I absolutely loved. I still make paper sculptures from time to time but these days they're rarely based on any architectural designs.
When I wrote the song Show Me I knew I wanted to make an accompanying video that somehow captured the beauty and strangeness of natural forms. The song is about the world being seen through the eyes of a newborn and not just in a purely romantic way. "How do flowers bloom?" might sound at first like a cute, whimsical question but flowers are blooming machines that fire out smells at the exact right time to attract buzzing machines that collect their lifeblood and spread it around to more blooming machines! Nature is scary and wonderful and weird as hell! I wanted to make images that showed things that might be organic, or maybe not, that were definitely strange, hopefully pretty and doing something but you're not really quite sure what.
So I decided to make paper creatures and make a stop motion animation of them. The process was very lo-fi; I used my phone mounted on a microphone stand and an app called iMotion (I say "lo-fi" but really it's incredible how high tech phones are! Any day now someone will release a studio quality album recorded and mixed on a phone!). I also took some time lapse footage of the sky, also on my phone, from my garden. In fact one of the slowest parts of the process was waiting for the right weather to get nice time lapse footage of clouds! Ireland was having an unusually sunny few days and there wasn't a cloud in the sky, which is lovely in reality but very boring on camera.
I hope you enjoy the video!
When I wrote the song Show Me I knew I wanted to make an accompanying video that somehow captured the beauty and strangeness of natural forms. The song is about the world being seen through the eyes of a newborn and not just in a purely romantic way. "How do flowers bloom?" might sound at first like a cute, whimsical question but flowers are blooming machines that fire out smells at the exact right time to attract buzzing machines that collect their lifeblood and spread it around to more blooming machines! Nature is scary and wonderful and weird as hell! I wanted to make images that showed things that might be organic, or maybe not, that were definitely strange, hopefully pretty and doing something but you're not really quite sure what.
So I decided to make paper creatures and make a stop motion animation of them. The process was very lo-fi; I used my phone mounted on a microphone stand and an app called iMotion (I say "lo-fi" but really it's incredible how high tech phones are! Any day now someone will release a studio quality album recorded and mixed on a phone!). I also took some time lapse footage of the sky, also on my phone, from my garden. In fact one of the slowest parts of the process was waiting for the right weather to get nice time lapse footage of clouds! Ireland was having an unusually sunny few days and there wasn't a cloud in the sky, which is lovely in reality but very boring on camera.
I hope you enjoy the video!
