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Comment by flobosg | Hacker News Reader

The syncing of the visuals to the music brings to mind the video for The Chemical Brothers’ Star Guitar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0S43IwBF0uM

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A really impressive achievement, I wonder how they achieved it when the song was released.

If you like that, you can look up other music video shot by Michel Gondry. He has an incredible creativity and DIY ethos that really sets him appart.

The film "Be Kind, Rewind" is kind of a "mise en abîme" in that regards, shot by Gondry and featuring characters that show the same kind of cinematic craftiness.

https://m.youtube.com/watch/GF0-wGbRqEs

Making of Star Guitar

I recall seeing a behind-the-scenes clip somewhere (perhaps on the Directors Label series that came out in the early 2000s) where Gondry talks about his brother piecing this together from video footage they'd captured. I can't find that clip but came across this very early exploration towards the final product: https://youtu.be/GF0-wGbRqEs

Star Guitar is from 2003 which was well in the era of "cheap computers are good enough now that we can manipulate each pixel" (after all, Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park were made in the early 90's, and music videos usually don't need "cinematic" image quality because they were broadcasted over TV).

If you look closely at the Star Guitar video, you can find "clipping artefacts" where the fragments are pieced together or fade in and out.

Some of the background buildings look completely flat when they should have some slight depth. It took me dozens of viewings before I even noticed

I don’t disagree with your point however Jurassic Park was mostly animatronics so not the best example to use.

Well it's just a few minutes, but definitely the most impressive few minutes of the movie ;) AFAIK most scenes where dinosaurs are jumping and running around were computer-rendered.

Remember that scene where the protagonists are running with the dino swarm around them? The paths of the dinosaurs were laid out in the real world with tennis balls, and back then we wondered "wow they must have great image processing code to remove all those tracking markers". Turns out it wasn't algorithms but humans who removed them frame by frame, pixel by pixel (it didn't occur to us computer nerds that brute force makes the most sense if you're on a tight schedule).

The different elements in the scenery represent various sounds and instruments in the song.

Another of Gondry's videos that did a similar thing was Daft Punk - Around the World (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKYPYj2XX80) where each of the different types of "people" represented different sounds in the source track.

I think they did a good job choosing a scene that is somewhat easier for CGI: artists have struggled for a long time to make acceleration and general changes of momentum line up with the way that objects do so in real life. It also makes the motion blur shader more or less a constant which is easy to simulate, and our brain fills in the rest :)

Music video reminded me of "The Cure - Jumping Someone Else's Train".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1oWf07FRCw

From Wikipedia: The music video shows a speeded up view from the driver's cab of a train journey from London Victoria to Brighton Station.

It reminded me of the old Amega demo scene. I think it is the overly strong syncing with the beat. More deviation from it would be an improvement.

Also lots of cheaply produced music videos for techno songs in the mid 90's that needed "something, anything" to run on MTV looked like that :)

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