Beautiful video from The Spinto Band, an american indie musical group, is for the song Living Things, from their latest album Shy Pursuit produced by Spintonic Records.

Animated by Phil Davis, who teaches video-production in the Electronic Media and Film department of Towson University, the video consists in two different parts.
First we can see a number of little critters, moving and changing their shape in a continuos animation, in witch everything is constantly changing in something else, from a primeval cell to some humanlike being, and then exploding in various parts, before re-aggregating in something new, which sends out something else. Wow. This part put to use a similar technique witch can be seen in this Lorn’s video, Davis certainly knows about that, but the moment in the video I prefer is at 1:50, where the animation is perfectly synchronized with the music, and all the little monsters that come-up seem to be dancing! Wow, again. After this “modern ballet” the video changes his appearance, it becomes a stop motion, in which the band is singing dancing and flying. Yes flying, because, you know, in stop motion everything is possible!

Npr.org published a part of e-mail in which the director explains how comes this idea, and it was something like this:

«“The Living Things” is a combination of hand drawn animation and pixilation (stop motion animation of humans). All of the roughly 2,000 drawings in the animation were created frame-by-frame by me over the course of 20 months. The animation frames were timed and synchronized to the music using an x-sheet, a method that dates back to the earliest sound cartoons created by the Walt Disney studios. The pixilation animation was greatly influenced by the work of Canadian animator Norman McLaren».

So we can say this is an interesting example of techniques mixture, and it is strongly recommended to have a seen on Phil Davis’ Vimeo channel. Yeah!