A Canadian indie rock band called Young Rival thought it would be cool to make their music video on a dot matrix printer. I doubt they thought the process would take TWO YEARS. Read on after the video:
Every frame of a digitally shot video was printed out old school, on a honest-to-goodness dot matrix printer. Each frame was then scanned back into a computer in a kind of “stop-motion” animation to create what you saw above. Could modern effects have produced the same product? Yeah, maybe. But the video’s “analog” backstory is the thing that gives it energy, no?
The process wasn’t without its issues. From Vice’s The Creative Project:
“The video opens on four dot matrix printers sitting on a table, however only one of the four printers is actually shown printing, and there’s a reason for that. “We bought our first printer on ebay, and abused it with so much printing that it stopped working beyond repair. Then we bought another one on ebay, and the same thing happened. Since we are fools, we thought we’d try one more used ebay printer. Same result. We finally caved and bought a brand new one, and that is the one that held out until the bitter end.”
The printer also took FOREVER to print each page and they could only send like, 30 images at a time or else the whole thing would overload. They would have to print overnight….which meant coming in the next morning to jammed or imperfect copies.
This is why it took two years from the release of the song to get the accompanying video. And I think its worth a view. — [eric]
