It's amazing how quickly you will acclimate to the changes.

October 15, 2013 6:43 AM

Over four thousand photographs of three hundred and fifty people were used to create this amazing stop-motion(ish) music video "Young" by Australian band The Paper Kites [via]

From the [via]

Darcy Prendergast of the Melbourne-based production company Oh Yeah Wow decided to challenge his team with an ambitious project. In just seven days, they would gather 350 people and shoot thousands of portrait photos of them that they would then assemble into one stop-motion music video. Australian band The Paper Kites had created a beautiful song called Young that was about the fine line between individuality and conformity and they needed a video to convey this somewhat abstract idea.

Here's the beginning of that song:

We only wake 'cause our eyes are open
Open so wide we walk in the dark
Trying so hard to keep what we're losing
Using our feet to show them the movements

And they wake up, and they go out
Head in a cloud

Darcy enlisted the help of photographer Oli Sansom to make sure that each of his 350 extras were not only willing and ready but perfectly aligned. Sitting as still as possible for about ten minutes, each person had to pose with various mouth shapes. As he tells us, "We were aligning them with several registration points on screen, various markers for eyes and nose, so getting people in the right spot took quite a bit of work and time.

"We gave instructions like 'chin up a little, turn your head to your right a millimeter, now sway your body a fraction to your left' and hoped that people could comprehend. Our faithful subjects were actually a lot more amazing at it than I anticipated. They made our job easy!"

Finally, in post-production, four editors worked tirelessly, around the clock, to assemble the resulting 4,000 photographs to correspond with the lyrics.

Released just six days ago, the stop-motion video was quickly picked up as a Vimeo Staff Pick. The mesmerizing video is quite amazing especially when you release it was made entirely with photographs!

posted by quin (17 comments total)

This is stop motion, no "ish" about it. Stop motion that uses human bodies is called pixilation.
posted by ocherdraco at 7:04 AM on October 15, 2013

Nice.
posted by brevator at 7:04 AM on October 15, 2013

Lovely vid. Also: Pressing Play / Pause is fun.
posted by sandettie light vessel automatic at 7:09 AM on October 15, 2013 [1 favorite]

Whoa. As I watched, I couldn't help but think of it as a video of one quickly transforming being as opposed to lots of different people.
posted by umbú at 7:13 AM on October 15, 2013 [1 favorite]

I was prepared to dislike this as twee. I loved it.

(and shame on me for my reactionary prejudice)
posted by notsnot at 7:15 AM on October 15, 2013

This is cool. From the title of the thread I was imagining a processes where they use a computer to identify photos of people in similar poses and stitch those together to make a weird animated sequence.
posted by straight at 7:48 AM on October 15, 2013

Neato, especially when they alternate men's and women's faces.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 8:08 AM on October 15, 2013

I liked that a lot, but I have a strong feeling of deja vu. Wasn't there a pretty successful music video done pretty much exactly like this about a decade ago? Maybe in black and white?

One thing I found funny watching it was how the mind tries to fill in certain gaps--like I kept seeing glasses as if they were flying in or flying off people's faces, rather than just appearing and disappearing.
posted by yoink at 8:45 AM on October 15, 2013

I loved this. I'm gobsmacked by projects that show beautiful people are when taken as a collective.
posted by mochapickle at 9:28 AM on October 15, 2013 [1 favorite]

This is very cool. Watching it gives me an overwhelming feeling of "Wow. This looks like it was a LOT of work."
posted by 4ster at 1:22 PM on October 15, 2013

Humph. Obviously lip-synched.
posted by chavenet at 1:39 PM on October 15, 2013

This is stop motion, no "ish" about it.

Well, to my eyes, the video doesn't create a very strong illusion of motion, or even look like it is aiming to. Which makes it stop-motion-ish.
posted by dontjumplarry at 1:53 PM on October 15, 2013

A little more than a decade ago, were you thinking of this?
posted by gimonca at 4:32 PM on October 15, 2013 [2 favorites]

That made the facial recognition part of my brain feel physically uncomfortable.

But it was cool.
posted by patrick rhett at 6:29 PM on October 15, 2013

I'm absolutely loving this, it seems to trip up my facial recognition/eye contact circuits in the best way. Although I find it somewhat amazing that amongst 350 people there's not a single person who's even visibly balding, let alone bald.
posted by pahalial at 8:36 PM on October 15, 2013

On second look a few of them have receding hairlines, they're just getting lost in the frames. Fascinating, thanks for posting.
posted by pahalial at 8:47 PM on October 15, 2013

I liked that a lot, but I have a strong feeling of deja vu. Wasn't there a pretty successful music video done pretty much exactly like this about a decade ago? Maybe in black and white?

Mogwai did a considerably lower tech version of this a couple of years ago with "Mexican Grand Prix."
posted by Sonny Jim at 7:19 AM on October 16, 2013