Released just this past week, the stop-motion animation video for U2’s new single “You’re the Best Thing About Me” is making waves—not only among the band’s fans, but also in the design world.
Created by Art Camp, the studio of animator/designers Santiago Carrasquilla and Jos Diaz Contreras, the book in the video was created after photographer David Mushegain asked songwriter and musician Ary Warnaar—who was dining with Carrasquilla and Contreras at the time—to help him create a lyric video for the Grammy-lauded rock band.
“We all put our heads together and pitched ideas until we arrived at what eventually got made: designing a massive book of David’s photographs and hand-written lyrics and animating that book one page at a time,” Art Camp told Rolling Stone. “The Art Camp vibe is all about collaboration and making the kind of work that’s only possible when different types of artists come together.”
[Related: 8 Imaginative Stop-Motion Animation Projects]
The video’s concept was rooted in tactility and energy—a challenge when using photography and type to make a video. Typically, lyric-based videos rely on motion graphics and CGI, but Carrasquilla and Contreras said it was important to break out of that limitation. The team created a digital mockup as they put the book together for the final stop-motion animation.
The team shared some of their process:
Our goal was definitely to try to push the format as far as we could take it. The books we printed were at physical limit of how many pages you can bind together without them falling apart, and we worked backwards from there. A lot of very talented people worked really hard on putting this thing together. It was a great time—working around the clock and sleeping in shifts, all sorts of friends coming through to contribute on the layout or suggest an animation. A lot of people have asked us how much of it was done physically and how much was CGI. None of it is CGI! Santiago spent 17 hours on his feet, puppeteering the book with string.
As it happens, this isn’t the first time Carrasquilla has impressed us; in 2016 he was named a Print New Visual Artist. “Produce as much work as possible and learn from the process itself,” he told us at the time. What’s most important is the momentum generated by having done a lot of work and letting it envelop your life. With patience the answers reveal themselves.”
This article originally appeared in Print Magazine.