Hard for me to see any post-punk video with a paper motif — take this Aberdeen City clip from a few years ago as an example — and not instantly flash to the title of music critic Simon Reynold's book, Rip It Up and Start Again: Post Punk 1978-1984. The world and music and culture is malleable. Think of it like paper: Rip it, crumple it up, throw it away and start anew. That's the case in this video from the creatives at Humble. A group of hipsters who make their creatively destructive way through the city en route to a Passion Pit performance where the band is also reveled to be constructed of discarded and presumably recycled bits of paper. It's a cool effect for a cool song, even if it's proven to be as ephemeral, yet beautiful as fine art created from newsprint.
Inspired by the worn away layers of street art, advertising, and flyers plastered around downtown New York, they set out to create a world of distressed, animated paper. Think: Cases of spray glue, 2 video projectors, a couple of workhorse color copiers, untold reams of paper, 2 mannequins, 4 mexican wrestling masks, a stage full of cardboard Moogs, and one 1971 Charger, covered in 3000 sheets of torn flyers.
The video, shot on the new handheld Canon 5d DSLR, was edited, tracked and composited in a normal post workflow. Then, every other frame, some 4305 of them, were printed out, crumpled up, spray mounted in stacks, and then reshot on homemade animation stands. A month of long nights, razor cuts, toxic fumes, and a terrabyte of stills later, we came out with this."
--> watch "The Reeling" (hi-res Quicktime)
Passion Pit
"The Reeling" (Frenchkiss/Columbia)
Hydra (aka Sam Stephens, Ariel Danziger, John Hobbs), directors | Kim Koby, producer | Humble, production co | Aaron Philips, DP
