Music: German designer Michael Fragstein used digital 3D modelling to create forests and landscapes populated by miniature figures for Berlin group Dan Freeman and the Serious' Dagner music video.
The film is based on real-life footage turned into digital elements, and opens on a scene of a man sat at an imploding dinner table.
3D modelled people are shown in vignettes, surrounded by red thread and appearing to be moved by more strands. At times the thread looks to be unravelling from a giant spool, and at others it forms geometric frames around the characters.
Landscapes blend into one another, with tree trunks shown connected by a single strand to rocks and miniature fields. The thread resembles laser beams at times, and collections of floating pixels at others.
"I approached the project from two sides," said the designer, who was given an open brief by Dan Freeman and the Serious.
"A visual side with a collection of pictures, paintings and sketches, and the other side was the playful usage of my technical tools,"Â added Fragstein.
The designer studied architecture and design at the State Academy of Art and Design in Stuttgart, Germany, and now runs studio Büro Achter, which is also based in Stuttgart.
Fragstein worked with a photographer to shoot footage, based on sketches he had already created. An application called PhotoScan was then used to generate a digital 3D model from a composite of all the images shot.
"Our goal was not to create perfect copies of the original scenes but to play with inaccuracy," he said.
"We were feeding the system with imperfect footage and low quality values of our software," added Fragstein. "The intention of this approach was to let the setup appear more vivid and mysterious. In visual terms we wanted to refer to paintings."
The designer avoided creating an obvious storyline, instead using the thin red line of the thread as a visual way of linking disparate scenes. "This gave the freedom to increase distance to the song in many other visual parts," he said.
Dagner is taken from Dan Freeman and the Serious' self-titled EP.