Plastic Mermaids Drop ‘Taxonomy’ Music Video
The video for Taxonomy is a genius self-produced clay animation in the style of Bruce Bickford who crafted all the classic animations for Frank Zappa. Due to time restraints and the labour intensive side of the actual clay modelling, the band decided to rope in Plastic Mermaid’s fans to help out via their social media. Check it out below!
Speaking about the video Jamie from the band explains,
I’m pretty sure Bruce Bickford spent years on each video though so we knew ours wasn’t going to be quite as good. We committed to the idea, then Doug did some maths and realised that if we shot one frame every minute it was going to take us 54 hours of constant animation. Not wanting to die of exhaustion we decided to put a message out on our socials to see if we could get any extra helpers and we had about 20 Plastic Mermaids fans (of all ages) come and help us with the model making and animating. It was still a pretty intense experience trying to average one frame every 30 seconds and if we hadn’t had anyone help us we’d probably still be animating now! Strangely enough we found out that Bruce Bickford died when we were half way through making the video, so although we couldn’t possibly achieve anything on his level of animation, it still felt like a nice (strange) little tribute.