Dezeen Music Project: English electronic group Metronomy's latest single Reservoir is accompanied by an animated music video created with felt-tip pens by director Daniel Brereton.

Brereton directed the Reservoir video and drew the coloured illustrations himself, after Metronomy founder Joseph Mount came up with the idea to create an animation.

The colourful illustrations loosely fit with the lyrics of the song, including an underwater section that alludes to the title. All four band members are also depicted as cartoon characters.

"Joe's music creates emotions for me that I like to draw upon, and not be afraid to do something exciting and engaging," said Brereton. "I also wanted to make something people would watch more than once."

Subtle references to previous Metronomy videos can be spotted throughout the clip. "That was Joe's idea, which we ran with," Brereton explained.

Each frame of the animation had to be drawn twice to avoid pencil marks appearing in the sequence.

"I didn't want to get pencil outline on the finished thing – Matt Lloyd, the lead animator, went a bit white when I told him this," Brereton revealed. "So we drew a rough in pencil on white paper, and then using a lightbox we coloured in the drawings, using the pencil lines to trace, onto a lovely printmaking paper that made the ink bleed like anything."

The video took around eight weeks to produce and Brereton joked that they got through 457 felt-tip pens during this period.

Reservoir appears on Metronomy's album Love Letters, which was released on 10 March.