Omar Apollo’s slip on thin ice

Directed by rubberband. through SMUGGLER this complex, captivating music video uses an impressive blend of film and imagery. 

Along with audio spectrography, thermal imaging, hand-cut emulsion transitions, archival video, CGI, print, scanned 2D animation and volumetric capture, the duo used a range of medical techniques including EEGs, ECGs, neuronal activity simulation, heart ultrasound and brain MRI scans. The result is a mesmerising journey that not only reflects song’s story of Apollo coming out to his family, but is also driven by the singer’s brush with death.

The directors commented: “This collaboration with Omar was in pursuit of expanding the final millisecond of one’s life. In this case, Omar spoke about the moment of his near fatal accident on the way to come out to his family on the black iced roads of Indiana. We wanted to make a film that was both literal in its visualisations of physical, corporeal death and rebirth and abstract in its representation of the internal recreation of his consciousness. 

"We wanted the video to be an object that reflected the many different physical pieces of what it means to be a human and what it would take, in the realm of magical realism, to rebuild a human soul.”