Planetary anxiety amplified. For the launch of Kurakura’s album we directed, produced, filmed, edited and animated this complex experimental music video for the track ‘Seismograph’. Inspired by the band’s lyrics, our film depicts a photographer, documenting climate breakdown and subsequently losing his mind as he grapples with the scale of the subject.

From timelapse to flashframes, plus audio-driven special effects, we were very experimental on this shoot; creating a mind-bending alternative reality to match the atmosphere in the track itself. The photographer’s anxiety is shown with extreme close up shots capturing his raw, panicked emotion.

The water effects were all captured in camera, using a stroboscopic technique that matches the framerate to the frequency of soundwaves being played through the water. This gives the effect of water hovering at 24Hz, whilst it appears to slowly glide upwards at 23Hz. Our sound engineer Jim Donaldson wrote bespoke software to help achieve this effect.