Director Erez Horovitz collaborated with Sam Cohen to put together this stop-motion paper animated video for Josh Ritter’s track ‘Love Is Making Its Way Back Home’. The visual is comprised of over 12,000 pieces of construction paper, with no effects added in post. Have a watch above.

Here’s a little more reading about the clip from Sam Cohen:

The video you see in the end is purely physical frame by frame animation. Everything you see is photographs of paper with no effects whatsoever. One of the most challenging parts of making the video was looking at the computer screen during the pre-animation phase in rigid black and white with no shadow or depth, and trying to visualize how it would later look and work as paper in 3D space. We had to determine ahead of time which images to cut as positives or negatives, how to anchor the cutouts to the paper frame that surrounds it so the pieces wouldn’t fall out, and a host of other problems.

When the animation was finished, the team at Danger Awesome began the process of making the paper cutouts used in the final video, manning 2 laser cutters receiving images directly from the digital animation to create the 12,000 cutouts involved.

The final stage was photographing – good old stop-motion animation done at 15 frames per second. The frames were hung vertically from hooks in 23 rows, row 1 being closest to the camera, row 23 farthest away. The rig was setup in our makeshift cave of thick black blankets hung from the ceiling to keep out all light. The paper scenes were then lit from the front and below, and photographed with a digital still camera on a tripod. Each photo is viewed for 1/15th of a second and each cutout represents one layer within a frame. A single frame could have anywhere from 2-100 layers, with a setup time of 20 seconds to 5 minutes. Shooting took a full week of mostly sleepless nights, and Erez holds the record with 5 all-nighters in a row.

- L.U - YMT