Hasta La Ideas

Music: footage taken through a car windscreen of a town after dark was manipulated by director Kevin McGloughlin to create this music video for electronic act Sunken Foal.

Accompanying a subdued, atmospheric song named Never Knew, Kevin McGloughlin’s video features colourful patterns and shapes that spread across the screen – twisting and blending into one another against a dark background.

A sense of both forward and backward motion features throughout the clip, created by imagery appearing to rush either from or past the edges of the video frame.

Occasionally, recognisable objects like street signs and lighting displays can be picked out among the blurs.

“The concept for the video came from wanting to explore the idea of time perception in relation to emotion,” Ireland-based McLaughlin told Dezeen. “I thought time-lapse would be a good place to start – visually and conceptually.”

The shooting process consisted of McGloughlin filming through the windscreen of a moving car, using a DSLR camera to capture footage of different types of lights he encountered.

While driving around at night, the director filmed with a shallow depth of field that he constantly adjusted to create intentional lens blur and capture the abstract visuals.

The director took three evening car trips through parts of County Sligo, Ireland, to record the hour of footage needed for the film.

“The process was very enjoyable,” he said. “It was just a case of filming street lights and making tonnes of happy mistakes.”

During sections of the journeys, McGloughlin also took photographs at regular intervals to stitch together into time-lapse sequences.

After all of the photographs were captured, they were stacked into layers within a 3D software environment.

This technique created an illusion of depth, allowing the director to move a virtual camera through the images to create a sense of forward motion for the viewer. The opening few seconds of the film demonstrate this technique.

A similar approach was used for the live-action sections, with McGloughlin creating duplicates of the footage and overlaying them. Each duplicate plays one frame later than the previous duplicate, giving viewers the impression that they are moving through the footage.

Additional editing and post-production techniques such as the mirroring and morphing of images were used in the video, which took around a month and a half to complete.

Never Knew features vocals by Si Shroeder and is available to download for free from Sunken Foal’s website.

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