Stop Motion Music Video

COSMO SPEEDWAY – “Lights On”

Cosmo Speedway “Lights On” from Cosmo Speedway on Vimeo.

The set was too big to fit in my room, so I had to prop my bed against the wall and sleep on the couch for six months. It wasn’t a glamorous process. It was days of dangerously hot lights in a poorly wired apartment by myself, hoping my roommates wouldn’t get drunk and knock everything over. At one point, a halogen backlight fell and caught the dry brush of the set on fire. My room filled with smoke as the indoor forest fire set off all the alarms in the complex. I managed to put it out quickly and told the landlord that I burnt a bag of popcorn. I moved. My new place doesn’t smell like burnt foliage and plastic, so that’s a plus.

The video is comprised of roughly 3,600 still images animated in stop motion. I would take a photo, move the character, move the lights, change the focus, move the camera, then take another photo and do it again. It was all physically shot, except for the light from the bulb (vfx) and the stars courtesy of the Hubble Telescope. The vocal track of the song was stemmed out and fed into the luminance channel of the lens flare. This way, when I sang louder in the song, his light would shine brighter and give him a more human feel. The video was shot with an Olympus C-8080 still camera, and all in, cost us $386. If time were money, however, I’d be broke. This thing took forever.

Cosmo Speedway Band Site

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