Stop Motion Music Video Made from 4,000 Portrait Photos

Head in a cloud. It’s the final line in the chorus of The Paper Kites’ new single “Young.” And it’s also the way viewers feel as they watch the song’s music video—a stop motion masterpiece created by Oh Yeah Wow that combines over 4,000 headshots of 350 different models.

As the video rapidly shifts between faces, viewers are drawn not to the models’ varying features, but to their eyes. And this, along with the atmospheric tone of the song, infuses the video with a lovely we’re-not-so-different-after-all vibe:

The models were meticulously positioned and coached by the director and the photographer of the project—Darcy Prendergast and Oli Sansom, respectively— such that they appear to perfectly lip sync the lyrics and even blink at the appropriate moments.

It took seven days to shoot the portraits and ten days of rigorous post-processing to create the finished product.

“We were aligning them with several registration points on screen, various markers for eyes and nose, so getting people in the right spot took quite a bit of work and time,” Prendergast told My Modern Met. “We gave instructions like ‘chin up a little, turn your head to your right a millimeter, now sway your body a fraction to your left, and hoped that people could comprehend.”

oh yeah wow paper kites young music video states album single

This is just one of the many faces depicted throughout the video.

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