The Chemical Brothers ft. Beck – Wide Open
2016 · Directed by Dom&Nic (Dominic Hawley and Nic Goffey)
317K Likes
Best comments
1.“I've been searching for this video using 'girl dancing alone progressively becomes hollow' for 25 minutes. Finally found it.”
More comments
- 2.“FWIW, the dancer is Sonoya Mizuno – the service robot in Ex Machina, the alien mirror to Natalie Portman in Annihilation, and Mysaria in House of the Dragon.”
- 3.“She's dancing in my old abandoned Delphi warehouse in Rottenchester, NY, where I used to work when I had a good-paying job with General Motors. Kinda sad... but at least she's an awesome dancer!”
The story
One dancer, one empty room, one take. That's all you clock the first time through. Then you notice her body is disappearing. Bit by bit, dancer and actress Sonoya Mizuno (Ex Machina) gets swapped out for a white, see-through mesh, like a 3D print of herself, while she keeps moving through Wayne McGregor's choreography as if nothing is happening.
Directors Dom&Nic shot it in an old taxi workshop in East London, lit only by daylight, in a single unbroken Steadicam take. No cuts. They rehearsed for a full day first. Then The Mill spent months making the trick work: LiDAR scans to rebuild the room in 3D, a custom tool to erase her from the footage, a motion-capture suit, 11 GoPros as witness cameras and tracking across all 6,798 frames. Dom figured it might be the longest single shot of full-body tracking ever done.
The song, with Beck singing, came off the duo's 2015 album Born in the Echoes and went out as a single in February 2016. Dom&Nic heard it as a song about losing someone to change, and tied that to the idea that we're all turning into cyborgs without noticing, handing our memories and conversations over to our phones. Heavy thought for a dance video. It won Best Dance Video and Best Visual Effects at the 2016 UK Music Video Awards.
