This is a videoclip by The White Stripes for their single taken from 2003′s album Elephant.

The White Stripes are just the band that kept good old dying Rock And Roll alive in the ’00s. And their videos have always been simply amazing. In 2001 Jack White (lead vocalist, songwriter and guitarist of the duo), knew Michel Gondry, a talented director, and asked him to work with him. So Gondry directed Fell In Love With A Girl, Dead Leaves And The Dirty Ground a year later (hopefully both on Wanna Play Daily soon!) and then The Hardest Button To Button.

Throughout the whole video, in different ways, Gondry and the Stripes used the same technique, called Pixilation Animation. It’s a particular Stop Motion technique that allows the result to be a “progressive movement”. What did they do, specifically?

In every scene, they started by setting the maximum number of drum kits / amplifiers required on the stage, then started filming with Jack and Meg going in reverse on the elements, taking away after every short piece of footage an element.

In the end, after a couple of days of filming, they had a huge amount of little pieces of video.

Then, here’s where the magic takes place: after putting all the footage together with a program like Adobe Premiere, and playing it in reverse, the result was a progressive movement with elements appearing while Jack and Meg move forward!

The last part of the work was to synchronize the movements on the video with the rhythm of the song.

Thank you Jack, thank you Meg. And thank you Michel Gondry, too!