It's been 10 yrs since I first started working on the music video for "Easy Way Out" by @gotye. Thought it would be fun to share some of the process behind the video, so I've dug through the digital archives thread

Check out the finished video first:

Firstly here's one of the more simple tests for the stop motion sequence using plastacine for blood. This is partly replacement and partly straight ahead animation. The bigger blobs are mostly scrunched tinfoil and the floating drips are held up with armature wire.
#StopMotion

The whole video is motion control. It's a single linear spin, with a total of 4x rotations (1440 degrees). We stitched together multiple live action & stop motion plates into one seamless shot. This is probably the simplest motion control rig I've ever seen or used –it had 1 job.

To get Wally's ( @gotye) movements feeling stocatto like the stopmo, we shot him moving slowly with the cam & music playing at 1/4 speed & time remapped in post. Here's our first choreography and compositing test to develop story and check our workflow.
#MotionControl #vfx

Once our moco and choreography was set we tested blending the live action shots with stop motion elements. Here is the smoking test with a cigarette made from @SculpeyPolyform and smoke clouds made from cotton wool (stockpile visible on the right of shot).
#StopMotion #vfx

We shot the live action over several weeks because after every rotation we had to transform the set as @gotye's world was deteriorating, & we had to shoot all the #StopMotion elements in between the live action. Here is a breakdown of how some of the plates that makeup a whole

Basically everything on set was bespoke or hand made or modified. Deteriorating the set after each cycle was wrapped was very fun. There are some videos of TV smashing and lighting things on fire that unfortunately I can't find. Graffiti was the best place for easter eggs though

We tried to use as little green screen as possible but on a few occasions some stop mo elements when in front of Wally and there's no way I was gonna rotoscope each of these little flames. Here's director @d_prendergast animating some fire in the ktichen.

In post there was an obscene amount of #rotoscoping (all by hand in AE). This was before I was good at it, or familiar with (or had acecss to) more professional tools. At some point I decided to turn each mask into a stroke to see what it looked like and got this trippy result.

I also colour graded this video because I had access to a sutie and that meant a free grade. Early in my career I was a one stop shop for all things in post production, thankfully people with better skills, experience, and taste do the specialised work like this on my jobs now :)

I think that's it for now, at least that's all the interesting media I found in this folder. To finish off here's me hot gluing some fake cigarettes down to set (hot glue is a #StopMotion must have). Meanwhile to the 2 of you that "like" any of the posts in this thread: god bless