How The Brothers Lynch Created A No-Budget Hypnotizing Internet Hit With Public Domain Content...

By Keith Lynch

We see ourselves very much as narrative filmmakers and that is most definitely our focus but every now and again, we feel it’s important to stretch different muscles.  So if we have a little downtime whilst we’re waiting for feedback on a script, we’ll often fill that time with doing little tests.  Sometimes it’s testing out a visual effect.  Sometimes some motion graphics.  Sometimes it’s playing with particular shots.  But in this instance it was being inspired by what is seen as the earliest form of animation and trying to create something new from it.

We’d read an article on io9.com about Victorian phenakistoscopes last year.  We’d obviously been aware of zoetropes before but this article introduced us to the phenakistoscope disc and it immediately perked our interest.  We’d been mulling over ideas of how to incorporate the zoetrope into a music video for years but never settled on anything that felt fresh, but upon seeing the phenakistoscope it got the cogs whirring.  ‘Seven Nation Army‘ by the White Stripes has been a music video that has stuck with us for a long time and the way it employs the infinite zoom technique to hypnotic effect is fantastic.  Again it had been a technique we’d been wanting to try out but had never found a fresh angle into it.  But combined with phenakistoscopes, it felt like we’d found something interesting.

Remembering ‘Seven Nation Army’

We discovered that a number of these original Victorian phenakistoscopes had been digitized online and so we began hunting for decent resolution captures.  The great thing is that because of their age, these discs are all in the public domain and so can be used by anyone in their projects.   Once we felt we had enough to make a music video work we set about testing out the technique.  The first hurdle was to work out what speed we would have to rotate each disc at to produce the persistence of vision effect that makes them animated.  This is different for each disc as it depends on how many instances of the animation are present.  At first it was a case of trial and error, just trying different rotation speeds in Adobe After Effects and seeing what the effect was but after a while we realised that there was a mathematic approach to it that could streamline the process.  We calculated how many degrees each disc would have to spin per frame and then tested them all out.  Once we’d got that persistence of vision effect working on each disc we set about creating the sense of the infinite zoom.

Initially we tried to set up all the discs in 3d space and perform a virtual camera zoom but this was a massive drain on the Mac i was working on during lunchtimes at work, and so we needed to streamline it.  We realised we could cheat it by simply animating the discs scale.  Making it start tiny and grow over time to engulf the screen.  Then it was a case of applying this scale growth to each disc, masking out the centres and then staggering them in the timeline so that they all lined up.  Because they were all growing at the same pace, albeit out of sync, it perfectly created the infinite zoom effect and drastically reduced render times.

Once we had successfully created a test of the concept we then had to decide what to do with it.  Carly Paradis has been our composer on our past two short films and has done a fantastic job on both and so once we heard her new album, and especially the track The Hope Of A Favourable Outcome, we felt it was the perfect style of music for this video.  So we reworked the test so that certain animations lined up with certain moments in the song i.e. the boxers punching as the beat comes back in, the cellist playing as violin is heard.  Then we sent it to Carly.  Until that email she had no idea that we’d been working on it but her response was fantastic.  She had only one real note, to try and find some animations that would emphasise the bridge section of the song, but once we’d tweaked that it was ready to send out.

And so far it’s been getting an amazing response.  We’ve had nearly 12,000 views in the first 24 hours, been featured on the front page of theverge.com and even been retweeted by Duncan Jones himself!  It’s been really interesting to see the video spread around the net like this.

We’ll be releasing our new short film Old Habits online later this year, so it’s been a good learning experience on how to get exposure and has allowed us to build ties with blogs that could help with that release.

Really hope you guys enjoy the video!

http://www.mentorless.com/2014/04/02/brothers-lynch-created-hypnotizing-internet-hit-public-domain-content/