Jon Hopkins: First Feel Life

Blinkink animator/director Elliot Dear's stunning music video for Jon Hopkins’ Feel First Life uses a mixture of stop-motion and live-action techniques, with intricately handcrafted miniature sets, to tell a poignant tale of new life emerging from destruction.  

If you’ve got the nagging feeling we’re all going to hell in a handcart, this touching film eventually lands on a message of hope. Following the annihilation of the Earth as we know it, a seedpod blowing in the wind makes contact with an empty space suit to create a curious anthropomorphic life form. This lonely figure wanders the deserted landscape in search of life, passing signifiers of humanity’s achievements and failings  – a ruined churchyard, a war zone, a dilapidated space observatory, the remains of a fairground.

When all seems to have dissolved to dust he sits down in a rather despondent manner, shudders a bit and lets his erm… head release a host of spores into the universe to seed new life. As you do…

This is Dear's second collaboration with Hopkins from the latter's album Singularity, the first – co-directed with Robert Hunter – being Emerald Rush.

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