New Directors: Nathan Johnson

Son Lux: Change Is Everything

Nathan Johnson refers to the “lots of something little” approach when asked about the production on his video for Son Lux’s Change Is Everything. The description couldn’t be more relevant. Made with 200 push pins and 500 feet of rubberised thread, the stunning piece involved over 4,000 individual formation moves on a white board and was carried out over a month spent working 14-hour days at the director’s home.

“I’ve always been attracted to art that uses very simple materials in its execution,” explains Johnson of his attraction to the painstaking process. “I love the idea of seeing something ordinary and mundane transformed into something beautiful and lifelike. It feels extra-empowering to know that the price of admission is only the amount of time and energy you’ve got to spend.”

The resulting work, created with Denver-based design company The Made Shop, incorporates motion-captured rotoscoping of human bodies, buildings and expressive forms made with the materials picked up from a hardware store, to tell a story of change.

Johnson is a friend of Son Lux, aka Ryan Lott, and their collaboration represented a continuation of the pair’s longstanding working relationship.

“When his team came to us for this project, they wanted us to oversee everything related to the visual presentation of the album, from the artwork to the music videos and stage show,” explains Johnson. “Son Lux’s music is so cinematic and it’s just waiting for imagery. Really, it feels like it’s built to be a welcoming partner for visuals and it’s one of my favourite things when your eyes and ears are working in tandem, receiving equally great stimuli. If you can get the sight and sound working toward the same purpose, that’s the ultimate goal.”

With a narrow window of time and a small budget the job would always prove challenging, but Johnson reveals that he probably underestimated the actual amount of work that would be involved when conjuring up his idea.

“I was just racking my brain, trying to think of something we could do relatively cheaply in the studio and I wrongly assumed that it would be easy to move pins and thread. My brother Zach does hand-painted rotoscope animations that literally take months, so I figured I could squeeze this out in a couple of weeks without too much sweat.”

The most challenging part, he says, was the point in the video when the camera zooms in on a TV screen, requiring more pushing and pulling of pins than at any other point. “On the third day, we were still working on the TV zoom sequence,” the unsigned director concludes. “I just hadn’t anticipated that a) organic shapes require exponentially more nodes than simple architecture or geometry, b) outlining teeth with pins and thread is idiotic, and c) combining all of this into a zoom means moving every single pin a minuscule amount for each frame. In the end, it was all quite a bit longer, harder, and stupider than I imagined.”