A SCOTS animator spent six months working on a music video – helping an indie band beat Rhianna to number one.
Anna Ginsberg, 22, spent up to 16 hours working on each second of the four minute video to accompany the latest song by The Bombay Bicycle Club.
And her efforts were rewarded when How Can You Swallow So Much Sleep pipped R&B star Rhianna to the top spot on record company Universal’s daily chart of its own artists.
The stop-motion animation – the same painstaking technique used in Wallace and Gromit – has already been viewed almost 90,000 times on YouTube.
The fourth year Edinburgh College of Art (ECA) student listened to the song, which has already featured in the film Twilight: Eclipse, at least 25 times every day while creating the stop-motion dream sequence masterpiece.
Anna has known the London-based band’s bassist, Ed Nash, since her school days and after embarking on a film-making career decided she’d love to make one for them.
She said: “It’s been in the pipeline since my first film three years ago, which was very rough around the edges but Jack [Steadman, the vocalist] and Ed particularly loved it.”
Beautiful
Anna created two different proposals for the song which were pitched to Island records and its parent company Universal.
A panel were delighted with her second-by-second story board which showed a man falling asleep before rowing across a shimmering ocean and climbing a ladder to the moon.
Anna roped in fellow students to make models and costumes but had to beg one student not to give up on a project for the most complex part of the film, which sees the sleeping man’s patchwork quilt unravel.
The tiny quilt is made of dozens of tiny triangles which unravel.
And Anna was forced to call in fellow animator Anna Pearson as the sequence was so intricate and time consuming.
Anna said: “She knitted all the individual triangles on metal sewing needles with cotton thread and then threaded then on surgical wire. It took a month and a half and I had to call her up every day saying ‘Please don’t give up’.
“It was such a beautiful object. When she brought it up I was working about 16 hours a day. I got one second done a day because I was moving about 300 triangles with little pins”
The project, which Anna began last summer, was released on Youtube earlier this month.
Since then Anna has received an offer of work experience with Bafta-award winning Mikey Please, the man behind The Eagleman Stag a film about a man called Peter who is obsessed with time.
Jared Taylor, the animation director at ECA, added: “Animation is a labour-intensive process at the best of times but Anna was working all the hours god sends to make this so we’re very proud of her. I think she’s going to go a long way.”
