Amon Tobin: Esther's

If he hadn’t become a director, Charles De Meyer would have probably made an excellent debt collector. That’s not to say the Belgian is brutish; in fact he’s a nice, mild-mannered guy. But when he starts talking about the persistence it took to convince Brazilian artist Amon Tobin to let him make a promo for his track Esther’s, it sounds like borderline harassment. “I went to his gig and nagged the guy selling t-shirts to death until he introduced us. I pitched the idea to Amon and he liked it, but said there was no money for videos.”

He didn’t give up. De Meyer kept in touch with Tobin via email and continued sending him ideas until he agreed. But that was the easy part. Then came the issue of funding, sparking more nagging, with a 120-page pitch to the Belgian and Canadian governments (Tobin lives in Canada) being flat-batted back. Eventually, after more begging, Tobin’s label Ninja Tune agreed to pay for a basic shoot. “We did 130 shots with a small crew in two nights in August. It was a race against sunlight,” says De Meyer, though he maintains it was still fun.

After the challenges of the live-action shoot, De Meyer then spent eight months completing the animation in a studio he built at home, with friends working for free when they could. “It was madness. I ended up living upside down, working at night and sleeping all day. Production-wise it was a mess. I had no right to ask people to work on it – they had lives. But it was worth it.”

The result is a unique promo, in which a man uses a transforming robot to infiltrate a woman’s apartment and deliver a flower to her. It feels sinister at first and, as De Meyer intended, never really shakes that feeling. “The whole story was just a declaration – not a love story explained. For all we know the guy’s a stalker. It’s about how complicated we can make a declaration instead of just saying it.”

De Meyer, who has since signed with Tall Stories for UK, US and Italian commercial and music video representation and is in talks with Passion Pictures in Paris, started work on the project in 2007 (it was released in late 2010 as part of Ninja Tunes’ 20th anniversary celebrations), a time when lots of transforming robots were appearing in commercials and film. “It had become a bit passé. I wanted to get computer graphics back to being the tool and not the subject. It really annoys me that people think computer graphics grow on trees. They think you press a button and the computer does it for you. They think it’s soulless. But there was never any soul in the paintbrush to start with. I wanted to prove that a transformer could be a tool to tell something else and have a soul.”

Tobin was thrilled with the video. “I think it’s his favourite video [of all his own] but I haven’t seen him since we finished two years ago. We keep saying we’re going to pop some champagne.” Surely that will take a little less convincing.