Wieden + Kennedy London and Blinkink Productions have created a ground-breaking pop promo for We Have Band’s new single ‘You Came Out’ http://bit.ly/WYmVG
Conceived by married couple Thomas and Dede Wegg-Prosser and completed by Darren Bancroft, We Have Band have been making music since late 2007. With one years’ gigging behind them, they have established themselves as one of the UK’s most talked-about buzz bands. They have toured all over Europe, played this year’s SXSW festival, recently won Glastonbury’s emerging bands competition securing a big stage performance and have a summer full of festivals in front of them. ‘You Came Out’, which will be released on 15th June on Kill Em All, will be the band’s second single following the upbeat track Oh! Released last November.
Described by Time Out “as ‘the new Hot Chip’ if that wasn’t being unfair to both bands. Their icy glitch-rock is already having them hailed as one of the top tips for 2009.”
The music video was created by W+K creatives Fabian Berglund and Ida Gronblom, and Blinkink director David Wilson, the animated film is made up of 4,816 separate stills, featuring the faces of the members of the band – their eyes, lips and skin made up in varying, colourful ways. Each and every frame is hand-painted, shot, wiped off and redrawn, slightly differently for the next frame in order to create a seamless sequence. This time-consuming process involved the band members lying still for two consecutive days in a studio.
In order to animate the singing bit, lip movement was created by animating a painted mouth on the singer Dede. This involved breaking the lyrics into phonetics and giving each sound a specific mouth shape. In order to make this as realistic as possible all the mouth shapes were painted on Dede’s face individually and then shot. In order for the painted mouth shapes to animate the actual lyrics, they were put together in a specific order and timed to make up each word.
All of the 4,816 frames in the film have been uploaded to Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/photos/wehaveband) allowing people to re-edit the sequence as they see fit in order to make their own video, with their own track if they like. One of the images has an ‘Easter egg’ inserted which when clicked gives access to extra content for the lucky finders: an exclusive remix of the song.
Fabian Berglund, Wieden + Kennedy said, “The song is about a night out and we wanted to feature the band in the video but instead of them performing the song which feels very traditional we thought that what if we could tell the story of this night out by animating face paint. Their sleeping faces could come alive with painted eyes and even have painted lips on top of their real lips animating the lyrics. It's almost as if they are possessed, hope it’s not too scary!”.