Animator Elenor Kopka creates occult-inspired music video for Timber Timbre

Straßburg-based Elenor Kopka has created an animated music video for Canadian band Timber Timbre in her textured, monochrome style. “Ever since I made an animation set to music by Timber Timbre last year, I have been in touch with the band and when they recently wrapped up recording their last album (Sincerely Future Pollution), they reached out to me to create the music video for Grifting,” explains Elenor.

After being granted “complete artistic freedom”, the animator was unsurprisingly inspired by the band’s music. “Something in the way they construct their songs really resonates with me. I am fascinated by the strange and cinematic atmosphere of their sounds,” says Elenor. “When I first heard Grifting it instantly made me think of a swampy seaside village, set in the 1980s with a group of people meeting up for a shady basement game of poker.” Developing her ideas, Elenor then became fascinated by tarot card imagery and the “aesthetics of fortune telling”, which led her to create a video of an obscure card game “packed with occult symbolism”.

As for many of her animation projects, Elenor started by drawing a few detailed shots of what she imagined for landscapes and characters, trying to figure out the tone and atmosphere of the piece, rather than the narrative itself. “Then I storyboarded the whole video with rough sketches and edited everything on the song to see if the scenes and cuts added up to the beats and pulses,” say the animator. “Grifting has a super interesting and peculiar rhythm and it was very important for me to work closely to it.”

Once that was working, Elenor drew the backgrounds and worked on animating the video frame by frame. With just three weeks to create the video, the result is a hypnotic world of surreal figures, which is perpetuated with the clever repetition of scenes creating an unnerving, monochrome limbo. “There’s nothing better for me than to work with music that I love, for people that I deeply respect, topped off with this much trust and artistic freedom,” says Elenor.