Parallel Teeth takes us on a galactic journey in his music video for Mr Jukes

Date
17 August 2017

Strange Beast director Parallel Teeth AKA Rob Wallace has created an animated music video for Mr Jukes’ latest track, Leap of Faith. The song is a collaboration with De La Soul and Horace Andy, and forms part of an album of collaborations for Mr Jukes, the solo project of Bombay Bicycle frontman Jack Steadman.

“The video follows a mini Jack (audio cable pun intended) as he rockets through a galaxy of De La Soul planets and cosmically transcendent Horace Andy,” explains Parallel Teeth. “The visuals are finely tuned to the music, reflecting back the crisp drumming, echoing effect and chaotic solos.”

The video has drawn upon an array of references including the Kerbal Space Program video game, space-themed arcade games, the Minions, and the paintings of Wassily Kandinsky – “especially his abstract and geometric works during his Bauhaus period”. This has lead to a galactic aesthetic full of rich textures and gradients.

Parallel Teeth has used traditional 2D animation for the video and once a style and storyboard had been worked up, the video was broken up into scenes and animated in Flash by a team of animators. The textures, gradients and parallax background were added in After Effects to create a sense of depth, and bright, poppy colours have been used to “emphasise the playful and friendly tone of the video”.

The biggest challenge for Parallel Teeth was making sure the De La Soul planets were recognisable as the hip hop trio. “It took some time to work out how to reduce them down to simplistic shapes while still making them unique and easy to tell apart,” he says.

This is the second music video animator has directed for Mr Jukes, with the first being co-directed by fellow Strange Beast director Anna Ginsburg for the track, Grant Green. “While Grant Green was loosely based in reality, Leap of Faith is pretty far removed. This manifests itself through the character design and patterns,” he says.

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Parallel Teeth: Leap of Faith, Mr Jukes (still)

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Parallel Teeth: Leap of Faith, Mr Jukes (still)

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Parallel Teeth: Leap of Faith, Mr Jukes (still)

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Parallel Teeth: Leap of Faith, Mr Jukes (still)

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Parallel Teeth: Leap of Faith, Mr Jukes (still)

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About the Author

Rebecca Fulleylove

Rebecca Fulleylove is a freelance writer and editor specialising in art, design and culture. She is also senior writer at Creative Review, having previously worked at Elephant, Google Arts & Culture, and It’s Nice That.

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