A collection of 350 faces, delicate finger-plucking, and some well placed blog love has helped give an emerging Aussie band a viral hit internationally.
Melbourne indie folk quintet The Paper Kites are currently playing to sold out audiences across Canada and North America as support for City And Colour, and in the last week, and have found themselves in front of crowds who recognise the band’s new single ‘Young’, by way of its music video getting a lot of internet attention.
The concept for the clip is a simple and engaging one, the five-piece teaming up with photographer Oli Sansom and production company Oh Yeah Wow (the team behind the ‘ripped off Clubfeet video), who captured over 4,000 images of more than 350 people to create an ongoing stop-motion effect where a collection of still portraits are combined to give the impression of singing the atmospheric track.
The startling visual effect was enough to capture the attention of several tastemaking international blogs, such as Stereogum, Huffington Post, and Mashable, while earning ‘Staff Pick’ honours over on Vimeo, earning over 387,000 plays in just a week;’Young’ has also racked up nearly 90,000 views on YouTube.
Director Darcy Prendergast, whose previous work includes the clip for Gotye’s ‘Easy Way Out’, tells My Modern Met that the video’s concept was about capturing the song’s themes of individuality versus conformity.
Capturing thousands of shots of the hundreds of ‘Young’ participants over seven days, Prendergrast and photographer Oli Sansom had to keep their subjects perfectly still and aligned, often for as long as 10 minutes at a time as they posed with various mouth shapes to match the lyrics and singing of The Paper Kites’ Sam Bentley and Christina Lacy.
“We were aligning them with several registration points on screen, various markers for eyes and nose, so getting people in the right spot took quite a bit of work and time,” says the director.
“We gave instructions like ‘chin up a little, turn your head to your right a millimeter, now sway your body a fraction to your left’ and hoped that people could comprehend. Our faithful subjects were actually a lot more amazing at it than I anticipated. They made our job easy!”
Four editors were used to assemble the resulting 4,000 images to correspond with the track, taken from The Paper Kites’ “emotive debut album” States.
“We write and create music that we love and don’t tend to be dictated by what’s ‘cool’ or ‘in’,” 24-year-old frontman and chief songwriter Sam Bentley told Tone Deaf in a recent interview. “We’ve been fortunate in that people have loved what we have created so far and we’re very grateful for that.”
Following the completion of their tour duties with City And Colour, The Paper Kites return to Australia in time for New Year’s celebrations as part of the nearly sold out Falls Festival, playing all three legs of the annual arts and music event.
