Music: a crow created of matches goes on an journey via a paper landscape in singer-songwriter Gabriel Bömher’s music video for his very own track The Singing Gate (+ movie).
Bömher, who is also an artist and painter, took it upon himself to develop the visuals for the song by Ber – a collaboration among himself and guitarist Nacho.
“I desired to produce a piece that would stand on its very own although incorporating the diverse disciplines that I perform inside, so I felt it would be an interesting challenge to deconstruct my very own song,” Böhmer informed Dezeen.
The video follows the story of a crow, who is pointed out in the song’s chorus. The bird is brought to life by the sun and is formed out of a pile of matches in a man’s house.
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As the homeowner seems unimpressed by his visitors, the crow decides to go on a journey to make new buddies.
It flies out to feed some dogs with bones left over from the man’s dinner, but as soon as it tries to join other birds in the sky, the heat from the sun returns it to kindling.
“The burnt crow is then thrown into a fire by the man, who evidently has had the encounter of his matches turning into animals just before!” said Böhmer.
Ultimately, the crow becomes a cloud – joining other wispy shapes of animals in the sky.
The track – taken from Ber’s debut album Fort Increasing – has a raw, stripped-back acoustic sound, so the artist chose to reflect this in the rough edges and pale colour palette for the video.
“I desired the imagery to mirror the recording in its raw and slightly imperfect characteristics, but it was just as crucial to preserve warmth – which was why I made a decision to use animation,” Böhmer stated. “I believed quit motion would capture the two the tension in the guitars, and the nostalgia in the song’s production.”
Textures and patterns were primarily based on functions from his previous homes, developing on a essential message of the record.
“To integrate the album’s theme of making a property, I incorporated my favourite factors of buildings from places where I’ve lived,” explained Böhmer.
He integrated burnt matches to signify the dark cladding on Swiss farmhouses, patterned material for Argentine floral upholstery, and painted and torn paper for Scotland’s weathered stone walls.
The concept for the video was formulated speedily ahead of a gig in Edinburgh, when ideas had been jotted down on a napkin.
To develop the animation, Böhmer 1st developed a storyboard outlining each scene and the movements that would be incorporated.
He then designed the marionettes and scenery with thick cold-pressed paper, incorporating joints so they could be moved into different shapes and poses.
“I sewed the thread by means of the pieces, and then taped it to the underside of the marionette,” Böhmer explained. “I then created the set on a a hundred-centimetre by 50-centimetre stretched canvas.”
The characters and landscape had been mainly made from paper and card, but other components this kind of as twigs, material and foil had been also utilized to add texture.
The artist then took above one,500 photos of the marionettes, moving them in slightly various positions a small at a time.
“I had to go through a amount of check stages in buy to figure out the amount of motion needed, the ideal lighting angles and sources, and to finalise scene composition,” Böhmer explained.
The scenes have been assembled in Last Minimize Professional at twelve or 24 frames per second, then the artist edited the video for timing, growth and colouring.
The shoot totalled 50 hrs and the full undertaking took about six weeks to complete.
“I feel the video is in the end quite intimate, simply because it conveys anything private as a outcome of the visuals and song coming from one particular personal,” stated Böhmer.
Ber’s album Fort Increasing is out now.
