Hey there, folks!

Today, I’m bringing you a very tasty video we discovered only lately.

I’m glad to offer you the official video for Gotye‘s 2007 track Hearts A Mess, from the album Like Drawing Blood that came out that same year.

This videoclip was directed by an old friend of ours and a very special friend of Gotye, since he directed many of his videos. This guy goes by the name of Brendan Cook, from PictureDRIFT.

He’s a very talented guy, I recommend you have a look at what he’s done.

Here on Wanna I already talked about his work for Gotye’s Eyes Wide Open, check it out, too!

This video follows the same style of that video.

I think the kind of music Gotye does goes very well with the visual style chosen by mr Cook. His videos are very dreamlike and they tell fantastic tales drawn from what the song tells through the lyrics.

This one, according to what I got from it, follows the path of this strange character who goes around the planet bringing darkness and telling people like: «Don’t be glad, love is going to bring you down».

Not the happiest message possible, but it’s kinda cool.

Let’s get deeper: I really enjoyed the setting. Colors are awesome, they resemble a full moon night and I love that. Ad also the ambient is very peculiar and makes the whole video a nice tale. As regards the characters, they’re quite creepy, yet not scary. Which is perfect, in my opinion. And, plus, they look kinda like Jack Skellington from Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas, which is one of my favorite movies of all time. Maybe it’s because of the long black legs.

Technique is pretty much the same of Eyes Wide Open.

It’s a very refined mixture of 2D Animation, 3D modeling and real footage.

Backgrounds are real footage. They’re shot with time-lapse technique. Objects that overlap from backgrounds are introduced with a software like Adobe AE in order to make everything more realistic.

All the rest of the stuff (i.e. everything which is not time-lapse) are pictures, animated with the same kind of software.

The characters are made in a very strange way. They look like real figures, but they’re entirely created in 3D.

What makes them so material is the way they’re animated: once modeled, their actions were created frame by frame, moving every part of them on the software step by step. It’s a bit complicated to explain it in a simple way, but drop a comment if you are interested in more details about it!

I never stumbled into such a peculiar style, I swear. I’ve seen many pieces of animation, but nothing that looks like Cook’s ones! So, chapeau Brendan!