Surreal set design and ace direction for new Air spin-off project vid

“When I first heard this song, I was like: Whuuuuuuuuu…. this rules. Then I listened to it for a few days on repeat with my eyes closed,” says director Sean Pecknold of his brilliant new video for one-half-of-Air Nicolas Godin’s new release.

The video is a glorious melange of surreal live footage, shots of cats cradles that could come from a BBC learning programme and brightly coloured animation, leaning towards a delicious 80s vibe. “The graphics were meant to be simple, inspired by the 8-bit sound of some of the synth instruments in the song,” Sean explains. “We looked at the graphics in a lot of old video games from the late 80s and early 90s as well as early experimental film work by Richard Bailey and John Whitney.”

Alongside these references, Nicolas’ background in architecture also fed into the aesthetics for the song and its video. Le Corbusier joined a diverse list of inspirations including the work of Bach, and this single, Orca, is in fact a reworking of Bach’s Prelude & Fugue N°3 in C # Major. High-minded starting points have lost any air (ahem) of pretension though, thanks to Sean’s directorial magic, art director Adi Goodrich’s sweet graphic shapes and some brilliant work with ping pong balls.