The Shins – The Great Divide
2020 · Directed by Paul Trillo
5.7K Likes
Best comments
1.“New music from Tame Impala, The Strokes and now The Shins? This is keeping 2020 together at the seams.”
More comments
- 2.“This kind of song convinced me we've reached the Blade Runner timeline.”
- 3.“This song started playing on Spotify, and when 3:02 came up, I legit thought I was listening to a Shins x Donkey Kong Country mashup.”
The story
One camera move, from the Big Bang to the end of time. Director Paul Trillo built The Great Divide as an infinite zoom out: it starts in the abstract swirl of the early universe and keeps pulling back through atoms, jellyfish and human tissue, then people, then whole eras shown as museum pieces and sculptures, then a girl on a car in a burning city, and finally spaceships over a colonized planet. The whole thing lives inside a simulation, which is why it opens and closes on alien-looking code.
It was made in mid-2020, when nobody could shoot anything. The band was spread out and a live crew wasn't an option, so Trillo went fully computer-generated with Hunters House, a Los Angeles studio whose effects artists were mostly in Ukraine. A 13-person team built 23 scenes at the same time and stitched them together in about two months. Trillo doesn't love the slick look of pure 3D, so he roughed it up with fake lens effects, grain and noise until it felt like it came through a real camera. The band found him on Instagram.
The song was the Shins' first new release in more than two and a half years. James Mercer called it an epic about longing and love in a broken world, recorded with everything from vintage synths and a '60s Ludwig kit to iPhones and an 808. Trillo said the present-day scenes came out of America's 2020 divisions. Then the camera keeps pulling back, and the whole mess becomes one small frame in a very big picture.
