Son Lux – Change Is Everything
2015 · Directed by Nathan Johnson
40K Likes
Best comments
1.“If that's stop-motion, I'm giving up on life.”
More comments
- 2.“I was really hoping the beginning was just a trick to make me think the animation was real... but then I saw the holes in the board. Man... so much time.”
- 3.“Revisiting this in an age swamped by AI slop. The amount of labor in this video could send someone into a seizure today.”
The story
Two hundred push pins. Five hundred feet of rubberized thread. A stack of foam boards. That's the whole art department for this one. Nathan Johnson and Katie Chastain animated it by hand, one frame at a time, stretching thread between pins to draw shapes that spin, fold and turn into a city skyline, a face on a TV, a clock, then melt back into pure geometry right on the song's stop-start beat.
The trick is what they called projector-rotoscoping. Johnson's brother Marke modeled the spinning shapes on a computer, the team projected that reference onto the board frame by frame, and they traced it in pins. Johnson figured each frame would take a couple of minutes. Some took forty. He was pushing pins about 3,000 times a day for two weeks, his fingertips went raw, and once the foam got chewed up enough that pins started flying across the studio, Chastain made safety goggles mandatory.
If the name sounds familiar, Johnson is Rian Johnson's cousin and the composer behind Brick, Looper and Knives Out. The video won a UK Music Video Award and screened at SXSW and the 2016 TED conference. The song comes from Bones, the 2015 album where Ryan Lott's solo project became a three-piece band – the same Son Lux that later scored Everything Everywhere All at Once and got an Oscar nod for it. Sore fingers, well spent.
