Music: French director Hugo Moreno presents an animated urban landscape that blends ancient Mesopotamian and mid-century Contemporary architecture in this music video for Art Department’s track Walls.
Moreno worked with fellow director Grandson & Son and Art Department’s Jonny White to produce a stylised planet that is “somewhere between utopia and dystopia” to accompany the Canadian techno group’s electronic track.
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The fictional landscape depicted is populated with ancient ziggurat structures created among 4000 BC and 600 BC in Mesopotamia – an spot of present day-day Iraq.
Channels of water flow around, by way of and in excess of the buildings and plazas, where individuals are witnessed lounging beside desert-dwelling plants and hovering autos.
The video’s protagonist – a man who appears to be struggling to get more than flashbacks of the previous – lives in a Modernist villa reminiscent of individuals built in California’s desert cities like Palm Springs, by architects including Richard Neutra.
“As properly as Mesopotamian architecture, I acquired inspiration from Richard Neutra’s mid-century Modern day Californian villas for the primary character’s residence and Florida cityscapes at sunsets for the bigger backgrounds,” Moreno said.
“But I also looked at a lot of other references like cheap Florida postcards and video games.”
The guy can not seem to be to shake violent recollections, which flash up in black and white at intervals, and ends up falling into his swimming pool.
“There are distinct feasible interpretations but mine is that a man is haunted by subliminal visions of a woman suffering, maybe abused,” explained Moreno.
“We can envision that the man employed to be the writer of this violence, even though he tries to bury his memory.”
After submerged, the man appears to disintegrate into a black cloud that gradually pollutes the rest of the waterways and then billows into the pink sky.
The rest of the colour scheme is limited to purple for the buildings and bright turquoise for the water, adding to the retro-futuristic come to feel of the clip.
The concept for the music video arose soon after the production company and co-directors wrote a situation primarily based on an illustration Moreno completed a couple of years in the past.
The directors utilized Adobe Photoshop software program to edit the early concepts and last backgrounds, while After Effects was utilized for compositing and including water effects to the 2D animation, which was produced making use of Flash.
“I like to give life to the background by animating handful of particulars like trees and plants, waterfall and smoke effects,” stated Moreno.
“The French animation studio Chez Eddy generously provided us a workplace whilst Grandson & Son and Jonny White have been supervising the undertaking from Toronto,” Moreno explained.
The group spent 14 weeks on the venture, which consisted of two weeks of pre-manufacturing and three months of production.
Art Department’s track Walls was launched final month through record label No 19.
