In Radiohead’s new video, a rather creepy-looking Thom Yorke makes his way down to the forest, and finds all manner of things going on in warmly-lit comers of the wood - little creatures sitting around firesides, enjoying tea parties, celebrating weddings — before he finds the brightest thing of all: a coat like spun gold, a pair of magic boots. He steals them, defying the crows that guard them. But just when he thinks he has shaken off the pursuing birds by discovering the boots enable him to fly, he comes horribly, permanently to ground. He is turned into a tree.
With its multitude of influences — including Seventies children’s TV, Victorian photography, silent cinema and post-war Czech animation - There There is above all else rooted in the timeless quality of the fairy story. And, together with a delightful sprinkling of special effects (particularly stop-frame animation), it is fundamentally a human tale of greed and comeuppance. In the chase scene at the end it combines with the music to achieve an utterly gripping climax.
But in terms of its making, There There has less in common with a fairy story than with the nursery rhyme about Solomon Grundy, who was born on a Monday, married on a Tuesday and so on.
“I talked to the director, telling him the band’s ideas for the video, and the perfect script came back almost immediately,” says Radiohead’s commissioner Dilly Gent. “That was approved two days later, and they did this in next to no time.”
The director was Chris Hopewell, and Gent had discovered a director entirely in tune with the band’s own thinking for the video. Hopewell has worked with the Bolex Brothers, but more recently opened Collision Films to concentrate on digitally-based work.
“The brief I had was ‘Bagpuss meets Jan Svankmajer’,” says Hopewell. “That was absolutely perfect because I’m a big fan of Bagpuss and Svankmajer is probably my biggest influence as a film-maker. Dilly also told me that they had been thinking about the Brothers Grimm, and I had just bought a Twenties version of the Grimms’ tales. After our meeting | stayed up to 3am reading the book. Then I woke up at 5am and went up to the woods where we ended up shooting it - my head was buzzing with ideas. I went home, wrote the synopsis and sent it off.”
“Thom thought about fairytales when he thought about the song,” says Gent, and Hopewell’s script was based on virtually every Grimm tale he had read the previous night: man goes to woods, finds something magical and is offered something, but he gets greedy, wants more and ends up with absolutely nothing. He based the animal scenes on the photos of Victorian eccentric Mr Potter, who dressed up animals to appear undertaking human activities - the kitten wedding and tea party being among the most famous.
Radiohead loved the concept and the visualisation, and characteristically they gave Hopewell his head. “We had complete artistic control,” he says. “Thom was here on the shoot for three days and he never once said ‘Why am I doing this?’” Considering what the singer was being asked to do, this would have been excusable: he had to act out the part of the explorer at quarter speed in order for Hopewell to create faux-silent movie motion (later on, his part was speeded up and then frames taken on to create the jerky effect).
Yorke was also performing almost entirely against green-screen. Previously Hopewell and his team had shot the background plates - some digital stills shot in the aforementioned wood near their studio, with additional video that was also speeded up - then lit Yorke to match the backgrounds. It was a fairly tortuous process for the singer, but as Hopewell says, he still produced a superb performance.
“Thom was amazing — he would be on for 10 minutes then off for an hour, but he needed so little direction,” he says, “We would always get what we needed in one or two takes.” And, of course, his portrayal is hardly sympathetic. Yorke uses his face and body like a silent movie actor to convey the requisite weirdness and weakness, even generating humour from his attempted escape before he succumbs to his grisly end.
As with the rest of the video, Yorke’s transformation into a tree looks like it was created by filmed stop-frame animation. In fact, like everything else, the animation was achieved digitally, but Hopewell’s method is actually an inspired combination of the new and the traditional. Of the animal sequences, several were models constructed by the crew, others were stuffed animals hired from a taxidermist and altered. They were animated in traditional stop-frame method - but on a digital stills camera rather than a film camera.
There was only one crow, multiplied in post, and it was stuffed, then given added wires to make it “fly”. If it looks like something out of Hitchcock, Hopewell points out that this scene is pure Svankmajer. “The idea was for him to look like a taxidermied crow, not a real one.” Ultimately the whole project took six weeks — no time at all for what has been achieved. It was an intense, sleep-deprived period for those who worked on it, but for Hopewell, used to making shorts that appear in festivals over a period of months, what happened next has been a revelation. As he says: “We finished late on Thursday and couriered it to the band, who approved it on Friday morning and by 7pm everyone was in the pub watching it on MTV.”
Instant gratification. This story has a better ending than Solomon Grundy’s too.

PRODUCTION: Collision Films; director: Chris Hopewell; producer: Sue Gent; line producer: Ben Foley; line producer (live action): Ezra Sumner; DP: Fred Reed; camera asst: Jeremy Hogg; animators: Mike Booth, Virpi Kettu, Tom Astley, Cat Johnson; animation rigger/pixelation: Nick Upton.
POST: editor: Ben Foley; compositing: John Williams, Dave Lea; CG artist: Ben Austin.
COMMISSIONER: Dilly Gent for Parlophone & Radiohead.