The incredibly imaginative music video for the excellent Ankur Sabharwal song “Better Man” pays a wonderful tribute to the films of early 20th Century cinema. According to director Mrinal Bahukhandi, both the 1902 film “Le Voyage Dans la Lune” (“A Trip to the Moon”) by Georges Méliès and the work of Marcel Marceau and his famous character Bip the Clown played a great part in the inspiration behind this video,
My fascination for the moon continues as seen in this “homage” shot to Georges Méliès film “Trip to the Moon” that stirred the concept for Better Man music video. …Marcel Marceau was a French stage legend who inspired MJ’s famous moonwalk and kept the mime act alive with Bip after Chaplin’s more famous screen stage persona “the little tramp” faded out of public imagination. Bip was a natural choice for the concept of this video – a pastiche of early 20th-century cinema.
To capture the distinct look and feel of the time, Bahukhandi shot the footage on a Nikon F5 SLR at 8 fps on 35mm photographic film, creating an incredible 37,000 still images to make the video.
Essentially a tiny tribute to early 20th-century cinema, this video is intended towards recreating an authentically vintage video, while still being contemporary in expression. Being true to the times then, we decided to shoot the entire video on analogue stills at 8 frames per second.
Here’s the 1902 George Mieles film that lent so much inspiration to the video.
Here’s footage of Marcel Marceau as “Bip the Clown”.
via PetaPixel
