Music: hand-drawn imagery depicts stormy and celestial scenes in Alasdair + Jock’s intricate animation for David Gilmour’s Rattle That Lock (+ movie).
Gilmour’s track functions lyrics inspired by Guide Two of John Milton’s epic Paradise Misplaced poem, which directorial duo Alasdair + Jock studied extensively just before making the film.
“At heart it truly is a quite straightforward story of Satan’s fall from heaven and subsequent journey to corrupt Earth,” Alasdair Brotherston advised Dezeen. “It just so happens that he has to travel by way of some quite bizarre spots to get there.”
The black and white film commences with Satan’s descent from heaven, following his fall by way of the clouds. Transforming into a crow along the way, the figure is plunged into a burning lake.
The bird takes flight over a landscape populated with nightmarish men and women, inspired by scenes from Milton’s 17th-century narrative.
Related story: Dan Deacon’s exquisite corpse music video features 9 distinct animations
Right after landing in a nest of eggs, the crow feeds 3 newly hatched child snakes prior to taking off. It then flies across the scene of a man transforming into a tree.
As mountains appear and volcanoes erupt, the film’s action concludes on a shot of earth from outer room.
The pair were approached to operate on the undertaking as a end result of their operate on the animation for Coldplay’s album Ghost Stories.
Briefed to produce a sequence that would reference 19th-century French artist Gustave Doré’s complicated etchings, Alasdair + Jock worked with a staff of twelve animators, art employees and compositors to craft the video.
“When you seem at Dore’s illustrations and strip away the layers of etched information, the base drawings are very graphic and stylised,” explained Brotherston. “We approached the animation the identical way by commencing with a stylised base and then including layers of mark generating and texture to add richness and complexity to the image.”
Jock Mooney place together big-scale artworks for background scenes, even though Brotherston assembled factors in the composite.
Taking three months to total, Brotherston informed Dezeen that the venture was not without having technical difficulties.
“We had decided when we storyboarded it that we desired some large cinematic camera moves and this concerned creating enormous bits of hugely thorough artwork,” he stated. “In a couple of scenes we had been certainly appropriate at the limit of what our machines could procedure.”
Symbolism also characteristics heavily, and the film is peppered with obscure references to particular details from Milton’s text, this kind of as the three child snakes.
“I feel most people when they initial see it are fairly impressed by the rather relentless action and detail,” Jock Mooney told Dezeen. “That is most definitely born out of a mutual appreciation for some thing like Akira. We are masochists.”
Rattle That Lock functions on Gilmour’s forthcoming album of the exact same title, set for release on 18 September 2015.
