Music: Hungarian director Tomek Ducki borrowed trends from 1980s eastern-European poster design to create this animated video for Bipolar Sunshine's single Daydreamer.
The three-minute film depicts the Manchester pop singer Bipolar Sunshine – aka Adio Marchant – with other stylised figures, against animated overlays and backgrounds of rapidly shifting colours, objects and shapes.
Tomek Ducki's imagery in the film was initially informed by the aesthetic of previous Bipolar Sunshine videos – a look that reminded the director "of the approach used in posters in eastern Europe before the 1990s, with flat and solid covering colours".
"One of our animators did pretty deep research on shirt patterns from the 1980s, and I refreshed my knowledge about Polish and Hungarian posters from the same era," the director told Dezeen.
The film visualises the sense of frustration created between two spouses that have been geographically separated from each other.
"In the music and lyrics there is a sense of a loss of direction – like movement which leads nowhere; a loop without an end," Ducki told Dezeen.
The director plays on this theme by showing the characters tied to different ends of a ribbon or band – a visual motif that allowed him to simultaneously represent the characters' connectedness and separation.
Other scenes show characters being orbited by a planet-like sphere tied to their heads.
The result is "a combination of images and elements that are a visual interpretation of the song and lyrics rather than a narrative story".
The quickly shifting marbled segments that appear in some parts of the video were created by animating still image cross-sections of multi-coloured clay – a practise termed 'strata-cut animation'.
In the final edit, Ducki combined this with 2D and 3D animation, along with drawings and painted backgrounds, to create the video's distinctive look.
"One shot was drawn, then animated in 3D, and then covered by a clay animation," explained the director. "But it was sometimes the other way around and our 3D animations would follow the organic movements of the clay."
"The most interesting part was to mix 3D objects with the clay texture animations. The clay movements were so quirky and the CGI was so precise. It became a very interesting effect by the end in my opinion."
Located in four different countries, Ducki's production team of five worked against a tight deadline to complete the video. "It was an organic production, and we improvised a lot," said the director.
Daydreamer will be released as a single on 26 January.