[Video] Benga's Timelapse Waveform Music Video

My buddy Paul Mckelvie in the UK just showed me this music video for Benga that he worked on a while back as a runner for the video's directors, Us. The concept is fantastic and the execution turned out great. Once Us had the idea for the video, the next problem was trying to figure out how to actually do it. There was a lot of math homework, calculating the number of records per second against the frame rate. It worked out to be that 960 records would be the equivalent of 1 minute and 20 seconds worth of wave form. From Us' site "Each one had to be individually cut to a specific size, hand labeled, hand numbered and then finally polished. That process took 7 full working days to do. To animate the wave form, we built it and then carefully removed each individual record. This had to be done very gently as any shift in the position of the sculpture would result in the failure of the animation and as we had to literally destroy each piece of vinyl to get it off, there was only one chance to get it right. Once the sculpture was finally built, the animation process took about 30 hours." Enjoy!

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6 Comments

That's pretty cool, but i feel like the primary reason this video is interesting is because of the story behind it (and the insane amount of work) instead of the content itself, which i find anticlimactic.

i bet they did the timelapse backwards to keep the pole steady, and just cut off the vinyl off as each frame progressed...... what do you think?  plausible?

Isn't that what they said they did?

"To animate the wave form, we built it and then carefully removed each individual record."

Yes Shannon, that is correct

Must be FM since the volume didn't vary much. Wasn't AM!

brain is limitless!! love it!