Animation and Music have always walked together to display the creativity and talent of artists and bands using the advancement of technology. Rock bands and their creations like Smashing Pumpkins’ Tonight, Tonight (1996), Queens of the Stone Age’s Go with the Flow (2003) while, artist’s creations like Kanye West’s Heartless (2008) have incorporated the use of varied styles of animation to enhance their songs visually by drifting from the usual live action form.
Creep, Pablo Honey, OK Computer, heard any of these? They are all compositions of the English Rock band, Radiohead, which was born in 1985. And, one more album has been added to their list as Radiohead recently released its new song Burn The Witch on their YouTube channel.
What fascinates us about this creation is that Radiohead took to animation to come back after a five year break after they released their eighth album The King of Limbs in 2011. In fact, Radiohead had even drawn away from all social media on 1 May 2016 as they deleted all content from their website and social media profiles replacing them with blank images.
And suddenly on the dawn of 3 May, 2016, Radiohead released a four minute stop motion clay animation music video of their new song Burn The Witch. The video opens with a tiny claymation bird who opens up the song by its continuous chirping leading to the intruding music. It is a stop motion horror story described as “Postman Pat meshed with The Wicker Man”.
According to director Chris Hopewell (who also helmed Radiohead’s There There video), the new animated clip “was conceived, designed, built and animated in 14 days”. Creating stop motion animation using clay in just 14 days is a difficult task as it is an arduous process and requires minute detailing. There is lot of back and forth in this style of animation as the whole film is shot by capturing one frame after the other.
The characters in this animated video are neatly created with the use of distinct colours. Every frame has varied elements in the background like flowers, trees, houses and farm that consume time when created with clay. Even movements of various characters have been worked upon as various gestures and actions are well executed.
The video has already garnered over 3 million views on Radiohead’s official YouTube channel and has become viral on social media. And, the reasons for it being viral at a frantic pace are quite justified as firstly it’s Radiohead’s first song after their five year break and moreover stop motion clay animation has added to its appeasement.
