Major Lazer – Light It Up (Remix)
2016 · Directed by Rupert Burton (Method Design)
4.4M Likes
Best comments
1.“This is what the monsters under our beds do when nobody's home.”
More comments
- 2.“When you're at the car wash and the brushes come alive.”
- 3.“I'm glad to see the music industry finally using people of color in their videos... Color. No? No one else? Okay, I'll leave.”
The story
This started life as an ad for the ad business. It was the 2016 AICP sponsor reel, the film that opened the AICP awards, which celebrate commercial production. Production company RSA handed Method Studios an open brief and asked for energy and attitude. Director Rupert Burton picked dance, because everybody speaks it.
They shot two professional dancers improvising at House of Moves in Los Angeles, about 50 motion-capture takes, then dressed those moves in 45 different digital bodies. One dancer is all fur. Another is feathers, or scales, or beads on strings, or a swarm of tiny blue balloons. There's a marshmallow man and a man pumped up like a balloon. A core team of three, plus three part-timers, finished it in two months, mostly in Houdini.
The film was then recut to the remix of Major Lazer's Light It Up, with Nyla and British-Ghanaian Afrobeats artist Fuse ODG. The remix went to number seven in the UK and topped US Dance Airplay, and the video passed 100 million views. Human moves, inhuman bodies. Major Lazer never looked so fluffy.
