What is the film about?

An animated Music Video for U.K. band ‘Wah Wah Club’, Black Rainbow is a gothic fantasy about the journey through addiction & depression.

This short film draws upon elemental forces as a metaphor to explore mental health, with the ‘Black Rainbow’ of the title a shadow-like entity that follows the band and cannot be shaken off.

Mixing hand-painted backdrops with computer-generated worlds, the sets are built with a puppet theatre aesthetic in mind, with moody futuristic spotlights casting gothic shadows for the Black Rainbow’s overall feeling of technicoloured darkness.

The viewer is taken on an animated journey through multiple dimensions, in a single continuous camera move from start to finish.

Watch out for the abandoned city of Milton Keynes menaced by colossal mutant ivy, experience the band fight oversized carnivorous plants, hitch rides with flying eyeballs & journey to inner & outer space on giant insects.

What influenced it?

Wah Wah Club’s sound could be labeled ‘post-grunge’, with influences from Queens of the Stone Age, through to Nirvana, Placebo & The Killers. Their latest release ‘Black Rainbow’ was originally written as a love song but took a dark turn reflecting a troubled time in the band’s life.

The band hail from the much-maligned U.K. city of Milton Keynes (an apocalyptic burning version of which, features in the video). Sarah the illustrator, has always loved working with collage, and for the video felt particularly inspired by surrealism, puppet theatres and the photographs of Kyle Thompson. The prominence of shadows is something director Ru was particularly keen on from the word go.

A little background information...

This song and video is a documentation of the pain of raw addiction and how reality is completely blurred by the overwhelming fear of trying to fit between the lines of society and the madness that occurs because of this….Using this animated world gave us, greater possibilities to make imagination and delirium a visual reality…

Wah Wah Club Singer Dan Buckland contacted Lost boys Studio about making the video together, ..… then promptly went into rehab…& then got *really* serious about making it once he had come
out.

How was the film made?

The video was produced and directed by Ru Cook at Lost Boys Studio (UK), with art work and joint animation by Sarah Harrison (Harrison illustration). It was filmed entirely against green-screen, and placed into animated scenes over a number of months, to create a new kind of artisan video style, the pair have dubbed ‘Nouveau Collage’.