Aardman Create Surreal Animation For Pink Floyd's Dark Side of The Moon

You're either a fan of Pink Floyd fan or you probably think they're a bunch of indulgent prog rock hippies. Either way you would've sat through their album The Dark Side of the Moon more than once, probably as a student, crammed into a friend's dingy living room when you should've been learning about Heidegger's concept of In-der-Welt-sein. 

The band's most famous album, the one with that iconic cover, turns 40 this year. In celebration the BBC have produced a radio play by Tom Stoppard with a story centered around the album's ten tracks, to be shown on Monday 26th August. As an accompaniment to this Aardman Animations, of Wallace and Gromit fame, have created a fantastic video inspired by the surreal imagery and experimental soundscapes of the album.

The piece was made using a range of animation techniques, "digital imaging [looks like they've used the RGBDToolkit], CGI, studio-based effects and hand crafted elements" with the stirring crescendo of "Eclipse" threaded throughout—and it hits the exact right tone.

As the narrator waxes poetical about the ills of the modern age we're treated to a series of images—men with jet engines for heads, giant machines ravaging the land—that perfectly encapsulate the album's journey through madness, greed, and getting old. As the director Darren Dubicki states: "The intensely surreal and powerful artwork created by Storm Thorgerson and Hipgnosis has always had a strong distortion on reality. Their sense of space and twisted context make for some uncomfortably beautiful art. This tone has been consistent for decades and we wanted to honor this with our contemporary digital (and analogue) slant on the style."

[via Cartoon Brew]