If you thought the video for Thone's Tharsis Sleeps - made up of individual frames created entirely on industrial weaving machines - was a unique achievement that could never be matched - well, you were right. But Tharsis Sleeps' co-director Nicos Livesey has now delivered another slab of awesome animation achievement. His video for rock band Radkey's Glore is joyous piledriver of a video highlighting the untramelled nutty delights of claymation.Made for the revamped Random Acts on Channel 4, Nicos brings us a breakneck journey of psychedleic destruction, through deranged versions of Radkey's favourite and most hated TV moments - incorporating a few nods to a few lightly-disguised icons - all crammed into just over two punk rock minutes...Harking back to the great old days of Jackie Wilson's Reet Petite and The Housemartins, and using a variety of claymation techniques influenced by pioneers such as Bruce Bickford and David Daniels, Nicos teamed up with ‘claysplotation artist’ Lee Hardcastle, working as an animation tag-team, until they realised they needed more animators - and lots more interns - for a lot of weeks...For all you animation nerds, the stats make impressive reading: it took 10 weeks from start to finish, 5 stop-motion animators on 10-12 hour days, 18 interns, two 5am starts; two 5am finishes; one all-nighter; 435 bars of clay, "which weighs as much as this man is deadlifting", two bottles of factor 50 kids suncream); and "miraculously only one trip to the pub." That last one is quite hard to believe.
David Knight - 23rd Oct 2015