28/11/2020
This weekend I have fortunately enjoyed two animated music videos and Kalle Matteson’s song ‘Thick As Thieves’ worked with stop-motion animator Kevin Parry is one of these fantastic MVs. As far as I am concerned, the combination of both animation and music is a creative way to expend the content of lyrics, though it is still a developing area like animated documentaries.
According to this animation, it describes a world history from the earlier brith of earth to human’s modern life by crafts in an interesting stop-motion way, making the whole music down to the earth. The most impressive element from this video is its unique expression in two materials: one is the huge earth or moon covered by different rough cloth fabrics and colours—representing different lands like rock, earth, sea and desert; the others are people, buildings, trees, animals, meteorites, and even spacecrafts shown as drawing papers cut and moved in a plane way(see below).
These are totally distinctive textures but the animator combines them within harmonious colourful pictures which give the audience a feeling of touching.
Additionally, its animator did a great work on the shots of expressing changes of history on earth. For example, at the beginning shot it starts from a white point light illuminating from a hole in darkness, followed by multiple paper-piles and rock stone which represent the Bi Bang, I think. After this transition is a close-up of the earth occupying nearly half of the screen as the main stage. The camera stays solid during the main earth part and contents including colours, sky and things change by rolling the earth land toward the screen, which I think is a creative method of transmitting the complex history in a short time(see below).
Then it is followed by a long moving shot of depicting national spacecrafts flying in the dark space outside the earth and moon. And it ends up with the same shot of earth part illustrating modern buildings and society, and destroyed by a huge robot.
The lyrics are simple enough for the whole music, but the animated frames give more meanings and contents about the video—they made a quick glance of the whole history. And its style of showing a children-like interest has left a deep impression on me. I really enjoy such way of attracting people’s attention—just beautiful and adorable materials encountering with each other and producing an amazing effect. And that is what this animated MV shows.
MV address: https://vimeo.com/23986237