Paperdoll, after bringing down the house yet again.

We think this makes it a better time than ever to revisit our own version of the video, and the design process behind it.

Starting the project, our most important consideration was Time. PaperDoll had fortuitously found themselves with the opportunity to get the song nationwide exposure as part of a DayQuil commercial that would air on major cable outlets, including Comedy Central and Spike. The ad had a set date for its premiere airing, and thusly our deadline also fell near that date. We had previously done a fully animated video for the band’s song “Anything At All,” but the time crunch imposed on this project made doing another animated piece unfeasible; Our solution was to follow in the footsteps of one of the most monstrously important and influential of all music video pioneers: The Strokes.

Though there is some performance footage of the band present in the video, the bulk of it is stitched together from vintage TV and movie clips, documentary films, commercials, and other visual ephemera. Enough correlation exists between the video’s images to maintain some sort of forward momentum, but the thematic vagueness of the flow of images allows the song’s energy and texture to remain the focal point. Especially for a song whose title and lyrics express confusion and immobility, the barrage of mood-buoying pictures more than anything else accentuate the personality of the song, without being distracting. Their technique seemed an inspired solution for our spur-of-the-moment assignment. By using copyright-free material produced by third parties, we would save ourselves the time needed to generate original assets (time we simply did not have), without sacrificing our ability to provide an effective video foil to PaperDoll’s song.

Our first step was to decide on an approach. The major connective tie between The Strokes’ song and its video was the parallel between the song title (“Hard To Explain”, as also heard in the song’s chorus) and the capricious, searching dynamism of the video’s imagery. Thanks to careful and expressive lyrics, PaperDoll’s song had a much more cohesive theme than The Strokes’, but it was unlikely we’d be able to create an equally coherent visual counterpart quickly enough. So a more general relationship to the song would have to be found. Our song was entitled “If Nothing Happened.” Much of our source material would be from vintage sci-fi and horror flicks, with lots of drama, explosions, and overwrought faces bearing extreme expressions; in broader terms, lots of Things Happening. Perfect!

Thanks to Mill Creek’s mammoth public-domain movie box sets, we already had hundreds of hours of available footage at our disposal. Cheap cartoons, japanese monster movies, weird commericals, and silents were sifted through for their most exciting seconds, which were then sheared off and sewn into the fabric of our moving collage. For movie buffs like us, getting to massage snippets of familiar schlock staples like Creature From the Haunted Sea and The Revenge of Dr. X into a framework that supported PaperDoll’s great song was an uncommonly pleasurable task.

Only about a weekend was spent corralling workable bits of film from DVD onto our desktops. Darius Hill, veteran Anthem animator, handled directorial duties, exercising his nearly superhuman understanding of the laws of film to re-edit the hours of unrelated, scruffy, obscure video into an actual statement that both we and PaperDoll could be proud of. Timing had to be worked out; clips were synced up to the words of the song via labyrinthine, arcane correlations between the two (Metropolis‘ Rotwang the Inventor indignant intonation that he’s made a robot that never makes mistakes occurs as PaperDoll audibly explains “Everybody makes mistakes”; and later, one of Gumby’s robotic domestics goes haywire, wreaking prophesied havoc on his neighborhood.) Shots were carefully organized to draw the viewer’s eye from one edge of the screen to the other and back again, leading you into the next shot with natural ease.

From inception of the project to delivery, Darius and his team completed the project within one week. Inspiration joined forces with hard work, passion for cinema, love of pop culture, and love of pop music, to hurriedly produce a suitable counterpoint to an expertly crafted tune. The result:

Let’s do it again sometime!