Play-doh

first it was balls bouncing to "heartbeats", then paint terrorism and now this:


somebody at sony has got quite the imagination. even though 90% of the art i do is on the computer, i'm really happy that there's been a bit of a resurgence of real-world special effects. while i'm sure there are many many artists responsible for this (including frank budgen, the director of this ad), the one that obviously comes to mind first and foremost is michel gondry. though he is probably best known for eternal sunshine, the lego white stripes video, and the incredible music video for daft punk's "around the world," my favorite effect he ever did was in the video for "deadweight" by beck. it involves shoes that look like they're walking one step in front of beck wherever he goes (check in at 3:47 in the video for the trick).



the genius of the trick is in its simplicity- in an interview, gondry explained that all he did was tie the shoes to beck's toes with fishing line and have him walk backwards down the block dragging them, and then played the clip in reverse. he also said that he got the beck video gig (one of his big breaks early on) by sending a home movie of him doing just this effect.