the class-o-matic

the Crazy Gnarls Barkley song and video

This video was directed by graphic designer Robert Hales, who previously directed the music videos for "Are You Gonna Be My Girl" and "Look What You've Done" by Jet, "Starfookers,Inc." by the Nine Inch Nails,and Richard Ashcroft's "Money to Burn".

It uses a very innovative combination of traditional 2-d hand drawning, and animation techniques like, rotoscoping - where you project film footage onto a glass screen, and then trace the images frame by frame on paper -then film or video each drawing, which you later animate/edit digitally - as well as an ink dripping technique over paper and water.

All these parts are then carefully synched in a layer compositing software such as Adobe After Effects, then in a sound editing program like Apples's Logic. It does takes a lot of time and creativity, and of course hard work, but the video is not particularily complicated or technically difficult.

Robert Hales' skill and invention, is, in the making of the video's visuals, the main ingredient