Skip to main content

Behold the Beautiful Video for David Gilmour’s “The Girl in the Yellow Dress,” Featuring 9,000 Hand-Drawn Frames of Animation

The animated video for David Gilmour’s “The Girl in the Yellow Dress” opens on a saxophonist with a familiar story—one so well-known to his bandmates they can read it on his face. But then the perspective shifts, and we follow instead the woman (or “girl”) of his woes, as she comes to see him play, gets ogled and turned into a fantasy by the men in the club, pursues the resident lothario, crushing the hearts of them all, including the saxophonist, who plays his blues instead of collapsing into a drink.

At least that seems to be the story, a typical nightlife scene rendered in a very dynamic, atypical way. The video, from a track off Gilmour’s 2015 album Rattle that Lock, was directed by Danny Madden for Ornana Films, who write, “The music video is made of about 9,000 frames of animation that were touched by several hands to get the layered contours, vibrant colors, and exaggerated character design of old French Lithograph posters. We wanted to create a moving version of that look, as if each frame had all the layers stamped on the page.”

An incredible amount of intensive artistic labor went into creating the boozy, swirling effects in each scene. “We animated with pencil, then contour lines were gone over with a brush tip marker. We used gouache to get nice life in the varying brushstrokes, then we layered the contours over the paint layer in the compositing step so that the colours would do interesting things when they ran together.” Maybe these images could be recreated convincingly with digital effects… but I suspect not.

The song “looks back at [Gilmour’s] earliest musical influence,” writes a Guardian review of the Rattle that Lock. If so, it’s a nascent influence that did not emerge often in his Pink Floyd playing, though the song may also indirectly pay tribute to the jazz-trained Richard Wright, memorialized elsewhere on the album. You can see several more scenes from this extraordinary video at Dezeen.

via Laughing Squid 

Related Content: 

David Gilmour Talks About the Mysteries of His Famous Guitar Tone

How Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb” Was Born From an Argument Between Roger Waters & David Gilmour

Watch Tom Waits For No One, the Pioneering Animated Music Video from 1979

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

Behold the Beautiful Video for David Gilmour’s “The Girl in the Yellow Dress,” Featuring 9,000 Hand-Drawn Frames of Animation is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/2Ko7VrV
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When Albert Einstein & Charlie Chaplin Met and Became Fast Famous Friends (1930)

Photo via Wikimedia Commons “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother,” goes a well-known quote attributed variously to Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Ernest Rutherford. No matter who said it, “the sentiment… rings true,” writes Michelle Lavery , “for researchers in all disciplines from particle physics to ecopsychology.” As Feynman discovered during his many years of teaching , it could be “the motto of all professional communicators,” The Guardian ’s Russell Grossman writes , “and especially those who earn a living communicating the tricky business of science.” Einstein became one of the world’s great science communicators by choice, not necessity, and found ways to explain his complex theories to children and the elderly alike. But perhaps, if he’d had his way, he would rather have avoided words altogether, and preferred acrobatic feats of silent daring to get his message across. We might at least conclude so from his reverence f...
Post a Comment
Read more

1,100 Delicate Drawings of Root Systems Reveals the Hidden World of Plants

We know that plants can inspire art. If you, personally, still require convincing on that point, just have a look at Elizabeth Twining’s Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants , the drawings of Ernst Heinrich Haeckel , Elizabeth Blackwell’s  A Curious Herbal , and Nancy Anne Kingsbury Wollstonecraft’s Specimens of the Plants and Fruits of the Island of Cuba — not to mention the paintings of Georgia O’ Keeffe — all previously featured here on Open Culture. But those works concern themselves only with plant life as it exists above ground. What goes on down below, underneath the soil? That you can see for yourself — and without having to pull up one of our fine flowering (or non-flowering) friends to do so — at Wageningen University’s online archive of root system drawings . “The outcome of 40 years of  root system excavations in Europe,” says that site, the collection contains 1,180 diagrams of species from  Abies alba (best known today as a kind of Christmas t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Zamrock: An Introduction to Zambia’s 1970s Rich & Psychedelic Rock Scene

The story of popular music in the late 20th century is never complete without an account of the explosive psychedelic rock, funk, Afrobeat, and other hybrid styles that proliferated on the African continent and across Latin American and the Caribbean in the 1960s and 70s. It’s only lately, however, that large audiences are discovering how much pioneering music came out of Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, and other postcolonial countries, thanks to UK labels like Strut and Soundway (named by The Guardian as “one of the 10 British Labels defining the sound of 2014” and named “Label of the Year” in 2017). Germany’s Analogue Africa , a label that reissues classic albums from the era, puts it this way: “the future of music happened decades ago.” Only most Western audiences weren’t paying attention—with notable exceptions, of course: superstar drummer Ginger Baker apprenticed himself to Fela Kuti and became an evangelist for African drumming; Brian Eno and Talking Heads’ David Byrne ( who ...
Post a Comment
Read more