Rotoscoped Music Video Weaves a Story Out of Yarn and Pins

Nathan Johnson's lovely video for Son Lux is an arts and craft project gone gainfully awry.

May 7, 2015, 9:30pm

Images and GIFs by author, via

Birds, flowers, cityscapes, and the disembodied head of Son Lux's lead singer Ryan Lott snap across blank foam boards in a flurry of pins in the band's new stop-motion music video for "Change Is Everything" (off of Bones, out June 23 via Glassnote Records). Released on May 5, the 4,000 frame, 200 pin animation was shot over the course of three weeks by director Nathan Johnson and his stalwart team of pin-pushers, The Made Shop, utilizing the painstaking frame-by-frame technique of rotoscoping. For each shot, the director projected pre-recorded footage onto the boards and, frame-by-frame, traced each image out in black or white string. After each woven tableau was complete, Johnson captured the scene on camera, eventually stitching this new set of images into a strange and beautiful stop-motion animation.

Johnson's creative concept for the film escalated quickly into a full-blown arts and crafts project gone gainfully awry. As documented in his behind-the-scenes video, the director's quirky choice of medium cost him and his colleagues several layers of skin and an uncomfortable amount of close calls with renegade pushpins. "By day three, the pads of my fingers were so raw that it hurt to move a pin,” Johnson admits in an interview with NPR, where the video appeared on Tuesday. “We also didn't realize that the surface of the foam core board would be blown out by day four. We got to the point where the board was so pockmarked that the pins would randomly shoot out and fly across the studio every couple frames. After that, we stocked up on a few more boards and started wearing safety goggles."

Watch the video for Son Lux's "Change is Everything," below, see NPR's behind-the-scenes on the making of the video, and then check out some of our favorite moments in GIF form: