Excited to share this quirky new music video for “Toy Baby Grand.” It was created using Textedit and free animated GIF clip art. A decidedly lo-fi effort, directed by myself and Philip Stockton. Read more about the making and watch the video below the cut (or at Vimeo / Youtube).

This video grew out of some quick “Eureka!” moments Philip had when pasting animated GIF’s into Textedit. (For PC folks, Textedit is Mac’s built-in text editor. And for the non-nerds, animated GIF’s are sort of an outdated image format from the early web days in the 90’s, when they were commonly used as icons of waving american flags and flaming torch headers.) We scourged free clip art sites, rounding up our favorite strolling polar bears, motorcycle riders, 3-d popsicles.

The raw footage was captured like a performance in Textedit. We copied, pasted, scrolled, deleted, all in sync with the music. The final result is a bit of an homage to the early days of “Web Art,” and also takes some inspiration from 70’s Op Art.

Watch it below. And stay tuned for an interactive game version of the video.



Update: The video is featured over at Offworld and Boing Boing!