I AM OTHER | CASH IN CASH OUT | 2023
The Three Guys Who Looked Like Clay Puppets Were Never Actually Filmed / I AM OTHER "CASH IN CASH OUT"
Pharrell Williams, 21 Savage, and Tyler, The Creator look like clay puppets in this video, but none of them were filmed for even a second. It's all CG. And the whole idea actually grew out of the fact that they couldn't be filmed.
The problem
It started with the 2020 pandemic. At a time when live-action shoots had come to a complete halt, director François Rousselet needed to make "something special." The approach he landed on was full CG, a way to make the video without filming a single person.
The insight
What Rousselet zeroed in on was the "repetition" built into the song itself. The core idea was to take that repetition and give it a rap-style twist by putting it on a zoetrope, the classic 19th-century spinning viewing device. He also wanted it to look convincing enough that viewers would wonder, "Did they actually film this?"
The idea
3D characters modeled after Pharrell, Tyler, and 21 Savage ride around and around on an endlessly spinning CG zoetrope, surrounded by a world overflowing with cash and luxury cars. Their faces have the low-resolution texture of something fresh out of a 3D printer, their clothes were modeled down to the fingerprints, the cars were detailed like Hot Wheels die-casts, and the movement was deliberately made to look like "imperfect" 12-frames-per-second stop motion. According to ETC, the builds were detailed enough that you could, in theory, physically construct a real machine that worked exactly like the one shown.
What happened
The project got underway in 2020 and took about two years to finish. After its 2022 release, it won four awards at the UK Music Video Awards 2022, including Video of the Year. In 2023, it also took home Gold in both the Film Craft and Entertainment for Music categories at Cannes Lions.
Afterthought
Turning "we can't film this" into "let's make it look like we did" became the whole concept for a music video. Watching a limitation become the very core of an idea like this is honestly my favorite thing to see.
Awards
- Cannes Lions Gold 2023
