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To create this truly memorable video for Graham Coxon’s track ‘What’ll It Take’, Ninian asked fans to send in footage of themselves dancing to the track. Ninian then began the painstaking task of editing all the dance footage together into an abstract, yet somewhat coherent narrative. The result is an incredibly playful and funny crowd sourced dance video.
The brief for this was incredibly loose and simple - just that the label wanted to do something with crowd sourced clips. What immediately dawned on me was that all previous crowd sourced videos have been very restricted - either by having to stick to locked off webcam shots of people at their desks, or straight edits of home movie footage. Some ideas you really have to work at and battle to find but this one came almost instantly: whilst still on the phone with the commissioner I remembered a little test film I'd made a few years ago called "The Beast of Dance" - it's a simple technique of using moving footage in the style of collage to build an insane monster.
https://vimeo.com/652580
It's a technique I've always wanted to do more with and so suddenly thought how amazing it'd be if all the collage pieces came from loads of different fans. If instead of sourcing footage, we instead sourced limbs! This then meant complete freedom with the clips as I'd take these 2D clips and use them in a 3D, physical way - using them as part of a larger story and film.
With a small crew I then shot a dancer freestlying a strange walk/dance through the streets of London. This was then cut together and was broken down into a few key simple moves that the dancer repeats throughout his dance. A video was then made and put on youtube asking fans to copy the moves:
http://youtu.be/FxancxuaSpw
In the space of a few weeks we got close to 90 submissions from 22 different countries. The original footage was then motion tracked and the various fan clips where "pinned" onto the dancer, matching his movements, so the combined clips act like a physical person.
Within a few weeks of being online the video has been invited to numerous festivals, featured in various magazines (iD, Computer Arts, Metro, idN, l'Oeil De Links on Canal +) and even screened in the Montreal's Museum of Contemporary Art!
"You don't need a huge budget to make a really great music video these days. It's just a matter of getting together a ton of interesting footage and editing it together into something spectacular. That's what director Ninian Doff did in his video for Graham Coxon's "What'll It Take," and the source of the interesting footage was the crowd".
The Creators Project
Ninian delivers his second video for Graham Coxon. ‘Ooh Yeh Yeh’ sees Graham’s video shoot being interrupted by a pile of clothes coming to life. Ninian again did all the effects work himself.
After shooting some crows in a park Ninian began the painstaking process of attaching human body parts
A pile of discarded clothing comes to life on a cobbled London backstreet.