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Music

Projection Mapping And Stop-Motion Combine Into One Awesomely Dark Abstract Music Video

Robert Jarvis combined an array of our favorite visual techniques to create an intriguingly dark jazz music video.

What happens when you cross video projection, stop-motion, ambient dark jazz, carnivorous birds and the skeletons of marine dinosaurs? A visual cacophony that could foreseeably coalesce into the background plot for a season of Terra Nova. But at present, this particular combination can only be found in an Australian music video, in which [Robert Jarvis](http://zealousy.com/ target=_blank) cooked all these elements into a frenzied and intriguing witches brew.

The video illustrates Suburbia, a track off the album Virtual Proximity by James Annesley, a saxophonist and electronic producer who pays homage to the dark-cinematic-electronic-jazz tradition with a dash of hip-hop beats. If you’re unfamiliar with his work, his is a series of records that you must hear as your background music upon entering the Black Lodge to play hide-and-seek with your doppelganger. This singular universe of sound perfectly matches the visual whirlpool created by Jarvis, aka 'ZEAL', a 26 years-old Australian video artist who makes homemade DIY video projects with an arsenal of technological aides. On his website he states that he “makes indietronica in his bedroom studio and animated music videos about cats in space on his bedroom floor,” so you know he’s the real deal.

To create this music video, he opted for a dark setting, and chose to combine projection mapping and stop-motion animation. The result is efficient but uncanny, as the video seems devoid of any rational plot, unless you count that rapidly approaching swarm of crows of the Apocalypse descending on Earth to destroy us.

In the instructional video below, Jarvis explains how he worked out the technical side of the music video, using Vidvox VDMX and the Mad Mapper software created by Creators 1024 architecture.