Vids › The Weirdness, Part 4

Steve Mason – Planet Sizes

2016 · Directed by Anna Ginsburg

2.1K Likes

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Best comments

1.“So so so so so so so good. (Apologies if I under-so'ed that.)”

More comments

2.“This is pretty much a massage for my ear and eye things.”

The story

Steve Mason used to front the Beta Band, and Planet Sizes comes off Meet the Humans, his 2016 solo record made in Brighton. One reviewer found it so cheerful he started wondering who the imposter was. Warm, tinkly synths and a man looking up for a change.

The video is about people who never do. Anna Ginsburg hand-drew every frame over three months, her first fully hand-drawn video, working with Loup Blaster and Toby Mortimer on watercolor gradients that were painted by hand, scanned and looped. The characters come from Olivia Bullock's album art: naked, colorful, flabby little bodies with mushroom heads, stuck in helmets that keep their eyes on the ground. Hills turn out to be heads rising from the dirt. The figures trudge across flashing squares, ride escalators to nowhere, and one gets trapped in a tank filling with water.

The hero, loosely Mason himself, bursts out of his mushroom head and flies around naked through a cosmos of shapes borrowed from Joan Miró and Alexander Calder's mobiles. Then he lands back in the hole. Ginsburg said it's about what a life of looking down does to you. Look up anyway.

In my playlists

The Weirdness, Part 4 · #117

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