The studio creates stunning visuals that capture lead vocalist Conor O’Brien’s ‘algorithm blues;’ a moth’s unyielding attraction to a flame becomes a metaphor for people’s unyielding attraction to technology.
Trunk Animation has shared the music video it created for Villagers' latest track, That Golden Time, which describes a digital bubble as a cocoon for humans.
To begin the project, lead singer Conor O’Brien created a brief that included a visual treatment outlining the video’s feel and the idea of “algorithm blues,” one of the lines from the track.
Taking a cue from O’Brien’s brief, Trunk director Rok Predin likened technology’s hold on people to that of a flame’s hold on a moth, describing people’s inherent draw to technology as something that can’t just be abandoned, regardless of costs and consequences.
A piece of slow-motion footage of a Dark Marathyssa moth, shot by Dr. Adrian Smith of North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, provided further inspiration for the music video. In the footage, shot at 6000 fps, the moth’s delicate nature, strength, and agility are captured. The insect’s gold shimmering scales and flecks that adorn its body and wings captured the team’s imagination. Predin and producer Richard Barnett chose the moth’s story as the basis to craft stunning visuals reflecting the song’s poignant lyrics.
To capture the beauty and fragility of the moth and communicate the metaphor, the team studied the insects’ composition and texture before recreating it in Cinema 4D. When examined closely, the hairs on the abdomen look like blurry pixels and when sitting against certain tree barks, they appear literally to disappear.
The team found that the 3D model from Dr Adrian Smith’s footage, initially used for reference, looked so good, “we actually dropped a couple of the live-action shots in as well. Try and spot them, there’s three shots in all!”
After first planning to lean into a documentary style, the team decided to work with the chorus’ energetic lifts; progression was needed, which comes as the moth meets the flame. The video turns into the abstract, described as “the inevitable meeting of moth and flame, future and past, life and death, glory, and devastation, all dissolved into one ecstatic explosion.” Trunk did an SFX shoot in Norfolk to capture the mesmeric particle systems.
Predin noted, “I didn’t want anything too digital; I wanted to embrace the organic randomness, so shooting at 240fps in 4K gave us some great options!”
Through an exchange of ideas and collaboration, the team created a moving image work, which they felt successfully built O’Brien’s vision for the song.
Added Barnett, “Too often walls are put up between creatives rather than allowing them to chat, but once again, our old friends at Domino showed trust, and alongside commissioner John Moule steering the ship, it was a really great process.”
Watch Villagers' That Golden Time:
Source: Trunk Animation
Debbie Diamond Sarto is news editor at Animation World Network.
