Rippled – A Beautiful Stop Motion Animated Video

Watch a hypnotically-beautiful music video for Australian indie band All India Radio’s ‘Rippled’ track. The video, which took over six months to make, was a labor of love for director Darcy Prenderast and the creative team at Oh Yeah Wow, a design and animation studio based in Melbourne, Australia.

Impressed and intrigued by the work, I wrote to Darcy, asking him whether he would do a short interview for JazJaz. He was cool enough to agree immediately for it.

Your first music video for All India Radio, “Lucky,” has garnered more than 5,00,000 views on YouTube. And now, “Rippled” is now rapidly ratcheting up the views, as well. Can you tell us a bit more about your obviously successful collaboration with the band, and how it all got started?

You know, I think we came together at an interesting time. I was 23, brimming with creativity and had just started my own business without a clue of how to run one. Which was fortuitous really, because I ended up making ‘Lucky’ for less than $1000 which is a somewhat terrible business decision, given how long it took to make. Its never been about the money for me though, the collaboration has been fruitful and easy because Martin Kennedy the main man behind All India Radio, completely trusts us. He makes great music, we make great visuals and he allows us the freedom to create.

The amazing locations seen in the video, add a whole lot to look and feel of it. Where did you film the entire thing?

It was shot in various abandoned warehouses around Melbourne… We wanted to shoot in a somewhat dystopian landscape. There is something so eerily beautiful about these areas, that are surrounded by various hives of activity but have been forgotten about by society itself. Its like your own derelict playground.

The process of capturing light paintings on camera can be hard and painstaking work. What were some of the practical difficulties you guys faced during the long shoots?

Changes in weather and lighting conditions can always be tough. We’d be half way through a shot when a storm would roll up, and we’d be forced to grab the camera and run for cover. We soon learnt to check the forecast before leaving and shoot undercover if it looked dubious. I think despite being energised about the piece, motivation was still ridiculously hard to muster at times. We would leave the studio as soon as the sun went down, set up, shoot until the sun came up. Go back to the studio, put the batteries on charge, go home sleep, wake up, do it all over again. There was just no spare time for ‘life’. Bills went unpaid, parents went unseen and girlfriends accumulated missed calls on our phones. It just completely consumed us. The closer we got, the further away we seemed. I kept pushing the crew for one more bridging shot, or a second attempt at another. At the time, the last thing you want to do… but in hindsight, the product benefitted from that perfectionism. I knew how good the piece could be if just did that little bit more… The last shot, (which is actually the first- where the character crawls from the water) actually took an entire week of shooting to finally get right. Every crew member tried it and after 6-7 takes, we finally nailed it. It was an important one to me to land, as I felt the narrative or theme would kind of be lost without it. Its abstract enough even with its inclusion. It was labelled the cursed shot, and required myself and one of the other guys to actually go waist deep and animate in a muddy, green water hole at 4am in the morning. That really did suck.

The location of the infamous “cursed” shot.

What sort of cameras and photo equipment did you use to shoot the video?

We shot on the canon 5d and two 7d canons when we had enough crew members to break into smaller groups. We never had more than 6 people at a time though. It was by no means a large production.

Are you and Oh Yeah Wow working on any more exciting projects at the moment? What are your plans for the future?

Oh hell yes we are! I can’t say too much re: the music videos that are launching very soon, but I have my little kids series ‘The Critter Litter’ in development with Nickelodeon at present and we’re doing a few online games for Star Wars and Transformers etc… This all makes us sound like high rollin’ agency types, but we’re street level. We love what we do and do it for the love… We just so happen to love Star Wars, Transformers and Nickelodeon.

Rippled-Darcy-Prenderast

Darcy Prenderast,

Visit Oh Yeah Wow’s site to see more of their brilliant work.