Animated Gotye video took nine months to make

By: Leah Collins Posted: 1:00 AM CST Thursday, Mar. 1, 2012

It takes time to give the world a new Gotye music video -- more time, even, than the Belgian-Australian's breakout hit, Somebody That I Used to Know, has been inspiring viral video covers and rattling around the brains of you and everyone else who made the breakup tune a hit from here to Australia.

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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 01/03/2012 (5314 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It takes time to give the world a new Gotye music video — more time, even, than the Belgian-Australian’s breakout hit, Somebody That I Used to Know, has been inspiring viral video covers and rattling around the brains of you and everyone else who made the breakup tune a hit from here to Australia.

Easy Way Out, the eclectic musician’s latest video, arrived over the weekend, and, according to a post on Gotye’s official website, the clip took nine months to create.

The video, which features stop-motion animation, finds the singer-songwriter enacting an endless loop of workaday drudgery: He wakes up, he works all day, he repeats the process indefinitely — or, at least until this two-minute pop song plays out. And just to make Gotye’s 9-to-5 existence feel all the more like an inescapable circle of hell, the whole thing was captured by animator/director Darcy Prendergast in a revolving 360-degree shot.

Stills from Gotye's stop-motion Easy Way Out video.

According to Gotye’s website, the crew built a five-room house “from scratch” for the purpose of the video.

“We completely disregarded good business sense, and created a piece of art that would hopefully leave the viewer’s cerebral cortex sliding down the computer screen,” director Prendergast wrote in a message posted on the Gotye site. “From a visual perspective, we wanted to bombard our audience with magic. I’m a huge believer of in-camera trickery, and have always been an avid fan of stop-motion, but those skills — fused with those of our resident VFX wizard, Andrew Goldsmith — enabled us to create some pretty astonishing, but deliberately understated, animation.”

Since its release in July last year, the video for Gotye’s Somebody That I Used to Know has had 90.6 million views (and counting) on YouTube. When asked about its word-of-mouth success, Gotye told Reuters that he doesn’t expect his followup singles to create the same splash as Somebody.

“A lot of people ask me, ‘Do you feel pressure?’ My genuine response is that I’m pretty sure my next single is not going to hit No. 1 in 10 countries,” Gotye told Reuters.

Could he be proven wrong? Watch the video for Easy Way Out at http://youtu.be/mEpfyBOdKxU (That song, and Somebody That I Used to Know, appear on Gotye’s current album, Making Mirrors.)