Australian animator Felix Colgrave's music video for Fever the Ghost follows a cartoon man and his pet serpent who turn their home planet into a giant disco ball (+ movie).
Colgrave's collaboration with the Los Angeles-based band began with a "very cryptic email".
"We arranged a video call over a few more cryptic emails, and then during the call the band was obscured by a large papier-mâché strawberry in sunglasses," Colgrave told Dezeen. "I generally say no to doing music videos, but they were fun to talk to and had already lured me that far through sheer ambiguity."
The animator then set about creating a clip for the band's track Source using visuals that he thought complemented its sounds rather than the lyrics.
"The band was adamant that I make whatever I want, to the degree that I asked for the lyrics multiple times, and they refused because they didn't want them to affect my creative decisions," said Colgrave. "To this day I don't know the lyrics to Source and I'm not even sure if they're all real words."
Colgrave created a story about a man and his pet serpent, who must travel into the centre of his hill-covered planet and flick on a switch to transform it into a disco ball.
To reach the underground world, the old man rides the beast through the mouth of one of the hills, which Colgrave suspects is "in on the whole thing".
"All the other hills may or may not know what's happening at all, but they're necessary for the light to get out of the planet for the disco ball transformation," he said.
This ritual awakens a nearby "party planet" and its inhabitants, who then dance as a choreographed troop. "They're just like dancers in any other music video," said Colgrave.
While the revellers enjoy their disco, the old man and the serpent have a picnic and play a game of cards until it's time to flick the switch again and turn the planet back to normal.
Colgrave created the animated video entirely using Adobe Flash software to keep the production process as simple as possible.
"Combining different software and mediums is nice, but making it all in the one thing had this immediacy, which is necessary if you really want to make everything up as you go," he said.
"No doing backgrounds or animations separately or anything like that, no wasting time planning, just working my way from one end of the song to the other, having maximum time for the idea to ferment, and applying the same type of thought to everything," he added.
The video took two or three months to complete. Colgrave showed the band the first 64 seconds and gained their approval, then didn't reveal the animation to them again until it was complete.
"It's just me drawing the way I draw, and animating it the way I animate," Colgrave said.
Source is taken from Fever the Ghost's Crab in Honey EP, released by Heavenly Recordings last year.