Set in a busy but nondescript city square, the video for Radiohead's Go To Sleep could be interpreted as a virtual take on contemporary life. The opening shot of a red rose, its open petals fluttering in the breeze, provides a brief glimpse of colour in this otherwise bleak environment. Everything we see, from the architecture to the throngs of pedestrians to the buildings and trees, is computergenerated. The only recognisable figure is a CG Thom Yorke, sitting on a park bench.
As he sings “Something big is going to happen”, the suspense builds, but not for the crowds of people rushing about, oblivious to their surroundings. As the song hits a crescendo, the tension reaches breaking point and the huge neo-classical buildings flanking the square begin to collapse. But the people are oblivious and unaffected by the destruction and continuing about their business as though nothing is happening.
Then the piles of rubble reconstruct, and it is evident at the end that the elegant details of the original buildings have been replaced with the more brutal lines of modern architecture. Nobody has noticed the change, with the exception of Thom, whose only reaction as the song draws to a close, is to get up and walk away. The final image is the rose again, drawing its petals shut.
“I thought people might think ‘what is this video about?’ and, to be perfectly honest, I can't fully tell you,” admits director Alex Rutterford. “The lyrics themselves almost seem specific, but there’s a lot of ambiguity, so I tried to reflect that.”
Having attracted the attention of the band with his virtuoso animated visualisation of Autechre’s Ganz Graf, Rutterford proves to be psychologically as well as technologically adept in CGI, using colour and light as calculatingly as any DP. Initially inclined to keep the video black and white, he accededto Radiohead’s request for a bit of colour.
“I deliberately kept the whole thing muted, and as the song goes on it gets darker and darker; it feels like there’s a storm coming.” The tension is heightened by the clear contrast between the realistic human movement of all the characters and their undefined, angular forms.
He adds that using lo-res polygonal figures is not exactly cutting-edge. “You could go back to Kraftwerk’s Electric Café and you'll find polygonal figures of people.” But Rutterford was involved in the creation of the polygonal image used on the cover of Coldplay’s album A Rush of Blood to the Head, and his initial meeting with Yorke confirmed his feelings regarding the video. “He had a notebook with him with lots of little dots in it, and he was joining them all up in little triangles.”
But to make it happen in little over two months he was forced to pass the burden of the actual animation work to a team at The Mill, lead by chief animator Jordi Bares - a tough decision for a hands-on director like Rutterford. “It makes you feel rather impotent,” he confesses. Having said that, he spent 11 days beforehand making the video as a 3D animatic: rather crude, it nevertheless set out all the camera angles, movements and timings for the animators.
“Cyber-Thom” was then built from data taken from a cyber-scan of the real Thom. A day was spent on motion-capture, with the morning devoted to sequences using an actor and actress for specific shots, and the afternoon on Yorke’s performance. As camera angles and lighting were not an issue, the shooting was straightforward - the wailing and gnashing of teeth came later, according to the director.
The majority of the crowd was created using the software used in the Lord of the Rings movies. Collapsing and re-constituting the buildings was harder to achieve. “You don’t just push a button and these things happen automatically,” continues the director.
PRODUCTION: Black Dog; director: Alex Rutterford; producers: John Payne, Ted Thornton; PA: Liz Graham; runner: John-Jo O'Driscall; sound: Michael Austin; scanning: Sean Varney @ Cyberscan
POST: post house: The Mill: producer: Steve Venning; lead animator: Jordi Bares; animators: Ben Smith, Rob Petrie; technical director: Dave Levy
COMMISSIONER: Dilly Gent at Parlophone
As he sings “Something big is going to happen”, the suspense builds, but not for the crowds of people rushing about, oblivious to their surroundings. As the song hits a crescendo, the tension reaches breaking point and the huge neo-classical buildings flanking the square begin to collapse. But the people are oblivious and unaffected by the destruction and continuing about their business as though nothing is happening.
Then the piles of rubble reconstruct, and it is evident at the end that the elegant details of the original buildings have been replaced with the more brutal lines of modern architecture. Nobody has noticed the change, with the exception of Thom, whose only reaction as the song draws to a close, is to get up and walk away. The final image is the rose again, drawing its petals shut.
“I thought people might think ‘what is this video about?’ and, to be perfectly honest, I can't fully tell you,” admits director Alex Rutterford. “The lyrics themselves almost seem specific, but there’s a lot of ambiguity, so I tried to reflect that.”
Having attracted the attention of the band with his virtuoso animated visualisation of Autechre’s Ganz Graf, Rutterford proves to be psychologically as well as technologically adept in CGI, using colour and light as calculatingly as any DP. Initially inclined to keep the video black and white, he accededto Radiohead’s request for a bit of colour.
“I deliberately kept the whole thing muted, and as the song goes on it gets darker and darker; it feels like there’s a storm coming.” The tension is heightened by the clear contrast between the realistic human movement of all the characters and their undefined, angular forms.
He adds that using lo-res polygonal figures is not exactly cutting-edge. “You could go back to Kraftwerk’s Electric Café and you'll find polygonal figures of people.” But Rutterford was involved in the creation of the polygonal image used on the cover of Coldplay’s album A Rush of Blood to the Head, and his initial meeting with Yorke confirmed his feelings regarding the video. “He had a notebook with him with lots of little dots in it, and he was joining them all up in little triangles.”
But to make it happen in little over two months he was forced to pass the burden of the actual animation work to a team at The Mill, lead by chief animator Jordi Bares - a tough decision for a hands-on director like Rutterford. “It makes you feel rather impotent,” he confesses. Having said that, he spent 11 days beforehand making the video as a 3D animatic: rather crude, it nevertheless set out all the camera angles, movements and timings for the animators.
“Cyber-Thom” was then built from data taken from a cyber-scan of the real Thom. A day was spent on motion-capture, with the morning devoted to sequences using an actor and actress for specific shots, and the afternoon on Yorke’s performance. As camera angles and lighting were not an issue, the shooting was straightforward - the wailing and gnashing of teeth came later, according to the director.
The majority of the crowd was created using the software used in the Lord of the Rings movies. Collapsing and re-constituting the buildings was harder to achieve. “You don’t just push a button and these things happen automatically,” continues the director.
PRODUCTION: Black Dog; director: Alex Rutterford; producers: John Payne, Ted Thornton; PA: Liz Graham; runner: John-Jo O'Driscall; sound: Michael Austin; scanning: Sean Varney @ Cyberscan
POST: post house: The Mill: producer: Steve Venning; lead animator: Jordi Bares; animators: Ben Smith, Rob Petrie; technical director: Dave Levy
COMMISSIONER: Dilly Gent at Parlophone
Q: "Now did you shoot anything for it, and then they just put the CGI over you?"
Thom: "I had to do that sort of... uh..."
Q: "Where they put the ping-pong balls over you?"
Thom: "On your face! It was horrible. It was about 60 of them on my face"
Colin: "Weird! Those ESP sort of things"
Thom: "Yeah. Stuck with glue… very strange. Very profound. Very… the weirdest video shoot I've ever been on because there was no video cameras. Uh, there was a director. All it was was a bunch of infrared sensors and people walking around in the silliest bubble suits you've ever seen in your life walking up and down doing all the crowd scenes, like, this girl and this guy doing all of the people in the crowd one by one. Very strange..."
Thom: "I had to do that sort of... uh..."
Q: "Where they put the ping-pong balls over you?"
Thom: "On your face! It was horrible. It was about 60 of them on my face"
Colin: "Weird! Those ESP sort of things"
Thom: "Yeah. Stuck with glue… very strange. Very profound. Very… the weirdest video shoot I've ever been on because there was no video cameras. Uh, there was a director. All it was was a bunch of infrared sensors and people walking around in the silliest bubble suits you've ever seen in your life walking up and down doing all the crowd scenes, like, this girl and this guy doing all of the people in the crowd one by one. Very strange..."