SEISMOGRAPH
KURAKURA / MARBLE FILMS
Planetary anxiety amplified. For the launch of Kurakura’s album we directed, produced, filmed, edited and animated this complex experimental music video for the track ‘Seismograph’. Inspired by the band’s lyrics, our film depicts a photographer, documenting climate breakdown and subsequently losing his mind as he grapples with the scale of the subject.
From timelapse to flashframes, plus audio-driven special effects, we were very experimental on this shoot; creating a mind-bending alternative reality to match the atmosphere in the track itself. The photographer’s anxiety is shown with extreme close up shots capturing his raw, panicked emotion.
“Technically impressive and visually engaging, Seismograph creates a sense of a single man’s desperate bid to understand the scale of destruction he has very little control over.”
— Shots magazine
“our stroboscopic liquid techniques give the illusion of droplets hovering in space, created by playing the audio through the stream.”
The water effects were all captured in camera, using a stroboscopic technique that matches the framerate to the frequency of soundwaves being played through the water. This gives the effect of water hovering at 24Hz, whilst it appears to slowly glide upwards at 23Hz. Our sound engineer Jim Donaldson wrote bespoke software to help achieve this effect.
Client: Kurakura
Agency: Marble Films
Exec Producers: Sacha Mirzoeff, Iris Maor & Jane Zurakowski
Directors: Reuben Armstrong & Jamie Neale
DOP: Jamie Neale
Actor: Kosta Adey
Camera Assistant: Joel Wisdom-Peters
Sound Engineer: Jim Donaldson
Edit & Animation: Reuben Armstrong
DIT & Edit Assistant: Ria Bale
Huge thanks to Films at 59, St Pauls Darkrooms & Screenology