Music videos come and go at an astounding rate, and it’s easy to just enjoy them once before moving onto the next, but occasionally a clip comes along that genuinely sticks in the mind.

Dan Sultan’s recent vid for single ‘Magnetic’ did just that, keeping our eyes locked on the screen for the entire duration with its meticulous stop-motion animation. Understandably impressed with the clip, we were keen to check in with the producer – the fearsomely-named Dropbear – to find out just how much painstaking work went into its creation – and whether he got tired of staring at Dan’s face for so many hours.

While Dan was forced to cancel his Adelaide and Brisbane dates this weekend due to personal commitments, he’ll be back to round off his ‘Magnetic’ tour this Sunday at Melbourne’s 170 Russell, Melbourne, followed by the final show on Sunday November 19 at Manning Bar in Sydney.

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Behind The Scenes Of ‘Magnetic’

Where did the inspirations for this idea come from, what informed the design, and what were you hoping to express with it?

I always wanted to do a stop-motion using 3D printing and Dan needed to be in the video but due to his time commitments we couldn’t animate Dan in person. The solution I came up with was to make a 3D scan his head and then 3D print a bust of Dan that could be animated using stop-motion.

I’ve always been a fan of the music video for Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer so you could say that I drew inspiration from that piece. I also wanted the 3D print to be stylised so I went for the ‘low polygon’ look where you see all the angled facets of the sculpture.

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The song is quite cinematic and has some dark undercurrents so it needed to reflect that, however the chorus is upbeat and has a soul-pop/gospel vibe to it so that’s where the projection mapping came into play. There are two sides to clip, a darkness and a lightness which also reflect the themes in the song dealing with excess and then trying to lift yourself out of those vices that pull you in and sometimes drag you down.

It’s really a performance clip with a 3D representation of Dan as a sculptural bust. Through out the video the bust transforms and becomes a “living work of art”. I really wanted to capture the emotion of Dan performing the song and also have some striking and memorable imagery to accompany the music.

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How did you go about creating something that would pair so well with the music?

Whenever I make a music video I’m always conscious of creating visuals that compliment the music and themes in the song. After speak with Dan and going through the lyrics I came up with some visual concepts that would match key points in the song. As the main focus of the video revolved around a bust of Dan I thought of interesting ideas that I could use to transform the sculpture whilst still allowing him to ‘sing’.

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Take us through the process of putting the video together – how many hours of work did it take, and how big was the team?

The first step in the process of making Magnetic was to create a 3D scan of Dan’s head and face. This was done by taking a series of photos of Dan at various angles which were then stitched together to create a 3D model. The model had to be cleaned up and made ready for 3D printing which was done by 3D animator Shawn Miller.

We made a 30cm high bust of Dan with a movable head and replaceable mouth and eye pieces so we could animate the full range of facial expressions and movement. There were 11 phonemes (a unit of sound in speech) or mouth shapes that were also printed so when put together formed the words for lip syncing.

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There were a number of other elements that were 3D printed for the clip such as the set of horns that grow out of Dan’s head, the morphing skull sequence and the magnetic sequence which consisted of 11 individual busts of Dan in various stages that when photographed in sequence created the spiky ferro fluid magnetic effect.

There was a lot of preparation work done to the 3D prints before the animation began such as gluing, filling, sanding and painting. The 3D prints were produced by pop sculptor and installation artist Christopher Langton. He had five 3D printers running 24/7 for a month to get all the prints done. There were over 60 individual 3D-printed pieces used to create the animation.

The projection mapping was done by video artist Jean Poole, which involved mapping the projections to the bust and then I projected them frame by frame while animating the bust.

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Were there any frustrating/funny moments… and did it get tedious having to look at Dan’d head?

The animation is a hybrid of new media technologies; 3D printing, projection mapping, stop-motion and some 3D animation. An interesting fact is that I used my 7 year old son and his friend for the hair and ear pull shot as their hands and arms were the right scale for the small bust of Dan. It wasn’t tedious animating Dan’s head as he is very handsome man ;)

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