Armed with X-acto knives and scissors, this epic feat of a live-action-turned-animated video was carefully hand-constructed by us and our team of supremely talented and fastidious collage artists. Produced by Peter and Josh at Vulture Culture Films, the video was shot over two days at Pie in the Sky studios and on location in the west end of Toronto.

Because of our love of all things analog, we decided to use nothing but actual paper for the final version of the video. This means we shot everything live action in HD, exported the edited sequence of 2465 frames (every second frame), printed each of those frames on paper (thanks, FedEx Kinkos at Bloor and Dalton!) and cut out elements of each shot. Then we re-photographed each frame against different paper textures and backgrounds and brought it back into Final Cut Pro and synced it back up with the song.

Here are some photos that we included as part of our pitch for this video, using Barry Feinstein’s photography of Bob Dylan that we altered with our paper collage technique, as a visual reference:

Here are some photos of the process – lots of scissors, X-Acto blades, rulers and self-healing cutting mats.

We used all sorts of different kinds of paper – from lined paper, graph paper, tracing paper and kraft paper, to the insides of security envelopes and old maps of Hamilton. We even found Arkell Street on a map – if you look real close, you just might find it in the video!

For friends and fans outside of Canada here is a link to the video on Vimeo.