Dezeen Music Project: this surreal music video for Dutch production trio Kraak & Smaak's new single Good for the City blends live action with an assortment of animated characters taken from old cartoons. 

Good for the City by Kraak & Smaak is a catchy, upbeat indie disco song, featuring lead vocals by British artist Sam Duckworth, better known by his stage name Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly.

Directed by Jonathan Irwin, the video stars Duckworth as a yellow robot singing and dancing alongside an eclectic selection of cartoon characters.

"The band's brief mentioned they were looking for something a bit different," said Irwin. "As part of the treatment I created a test video of a technique I'd wanted to use for a while - an odd mixture of live action and animation, the result of which is a bit like a kid's TV show on acid."

Irwin used Adobe's motion graphics software After Effects to create the animated characters, which he sourced from publicly available cartoons and added to the live footage frame by frame.

"I shot the video in a friend's loft apartment, which we decorated with a ton of fairy lights and colourful junk," he explained. "I used After Effects to populate the shelves with a variety of dancing cartoon characters drawn from ancient public domain cartoons, all rotoscoped and tracked onto the live action."

Good for the City will be released on 23 September on Jalapeño Records. The music video was commissioned via Radar Music Videos, a website that matches bands and record labels up with music video editors.

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