This Music Video Was Made with 2,250 Printed Photos

This is the music video for the song “UnAmerican” by the indie rock band Said The Whale. The stop-motion video was created by hand without digital effects: it features 2,250 separate photo prints rephotographed over a period of 80 hours.

After filming the band performing the song, director Johnny Jansen spent $680 on printing out 2,250 of the frames on regular paper with a laser printer. With a crew of 6 people, Jansen then painstakingly photographed each print in a new photo to create the stop-motion video.

“We timed out the entire video as an animatic well before we started shooting,” Jansen writes. “I also embedded the time code on the bottom right corner of each photo that synced up with our stop motion software. The problem was that the time code was so small we could barely read it so we almost lost our place a few times.

“Almost everything was planned in advance to make sure everything was timed properly. For the longer travelling scenes like in the backyard, we measured out the distance and divided it by the amount of frames in the shot so we knew exactly how much to move the photo each time. Pretty crazy process.”

The ridiculous amount of effort has paid off: in the three days since the video was uploaded to YouTube, it has already received over 125,000 views and is starting to go viral.