The team at Human Person studio reached out to me for some grungy visuals to accompany an episode of Netflix’s Song Exploder series. We had the honor of working on a full length music video for the song ‘Hurt’ by Nine Inch Nails. The dynamic duo, Ian Valentine and Aron Johnson, led our team to generate a wide variety of imagery based on the theme of decay. I was responsible for filming a range of practical effects and glitching all the content created by our beastly gnar squad. The crew at Human Person handled our final edit, which is now available to be viewed on Netflix. Currently that video can’t be posted on our social channels, so this website collect represents my contribution to the final piece. A huge thank you to the team at Human Person for bringing me on board, to all the artist involved and to Tachyons+ for designing the glitch gear that produced our final aesthetic.
 

In my explorations to represent our theme of decay and erosion, I experimented with the unique reaction between styrofoam and acetone. Acetone is incredibly flammable and creates toxic fumes, please do not attempt to replicate this process on your own. If you pour a small amount of acetone on pieces of styrofoam, it eats away at the material to create a slimy glue-like surface. I filmed the acetone eating away at various shapes of foam, sometimes layering different pieces to create small tunnels. Once the styrofoam dried, I loaded up the Black Magic 6K camera with a laowa 24mm probe lens and ran the it through each piece.

The team asked me to explore ways that we could incorporate lyrics into the video. I tried out a method of projecting the typography though various glass filters and re-filming it on a concrete wall. The wall added some nice texture and each of the filters resulted in unexpected distortions of the typography. The team then composited those type layers into the final video.

A large part of the video was focused on creating something both organic and synthetic in nature, so I experimented with a technique I’ve employed on a few other projects. The process involves breaking an old LCD screen, which I purchased for cheap at the local Goodwill. Once the screen was broken, I filmed the surface as I pressed on the screen with my hand. As the screen continued to crack, the liquid within the screen expanded, pulsing in and out with organic motion.

The song ends with a massive blast of distortion and guitar feedback, which runs for a long period of time. My mind immediately went to the experimental films of Stan Brakhage, the rapid film textures felt like the perfect fit for the song’s feedback noise. I mimicked Brakhage’s results by doing microscopic photo sequences of the eroded styrofoam and dead leaves (largely inspired by his film Mothlight). I also photographed several sequences of the concrete wall that I had originally projected our typographic lyrics upon. The final result was then processed through glitch gear built by Tachyons+ to unify the textures.

The final phase of this project was to process the entire video through a Sony CRT and a special glitch module called The Dreamweapon, created by Tachyons+. The module allowed me to explore several different styles, as shown above. Each knob changes the visual result, which I had to document on paper templates in order to repeat each style. Our final look was dialed in to embrace the greenish hues of both nature in decay and the synthetic green light of vintage computer systems. A huge thank you to the Tachyons+ team for making this gear available and for answering all my questions on getting it running.

Animation Studio: Human Person
Animation Leads: Ian Valentine, Aron Johnson
Animation: John Roxburgh Smith, Matt Cummer
Practical Effects & Glitch Processing: Peter Clark
Analog Glitch Hardware: Tachyons+
Opening Titles: Wolf & Crow
Theme Music: Hrishikesh Hirway
Practical Effects Collect Music: Enternull
Practical Effects Footage: Black Lake, Jodie Venema, Brad Scholl,
Till Schliemann, Cameron Veitch, Robert J Kemp