What is the film about?

The rainy season has run away, the streets are dry, the rivers and canals are empty. Ramo the toucan-headed man navigates the scorched streets of Paris searching for water to help bring the city back to life. Park chairs melt, bollards wilt and trees slump as skeletal birds watch on from chimney pots above.

What influenced it?

Henri Rousseau was someone who’d influenced Ramo a lot and was someone who’s depictions of parks and jungles were in our heads. The sense of space and mystery you find in the characters and landscapes of Giorgio de Chirico, René Magritte and Edward Hopper were probably in the back of our minds somewhere when we were designing camera angles and framing shots too. The streets of Paris themselves were a big influence as there are so many interesting compositions, rhythms and layers to use as stage sets.

A little background information...

We were commissioned by Pentagon MGMT (a Parisian music label, management and publishing company) to make the video having made another video for one of their acts ‘Bleu Toucan’ earlier this year. Ramo’s lyrics are very visual and it seemed like they had been wanting to find someone to bring them to life and to build an ongoing collaboration with. We are currently working on a second video due out early next year.

How was the film made?

As with most of our work, each scene was drawn and assembled in Photoshop along with any frame by frame animation. Everything was then stitched together in After Effects. We have an archive of our own reference photography that we make whenever we travel somewhere as we don’t like using someone else’s images or random things off Google for our projects. We have hundreds of images of interesting signs, drains, bins, shop fronts, walls etc… and luckily we had a big folder taken from various trips to Paris that had never been delved into for a project. Hopefully this helped add a little authenticity to some of the environments we designed and captured some of the small details you’d miss if you just relied on references off the internet.