Australian Band ‘Cut Copy’ Creates First 3D Printed Music Video

3D Printing seems to be making its way into just about all facets of our lives. Now, it has made its way into a music video.

Australian dance-rock band, Cut Copy, has released its latest music video for their song ‘We Are Explorers”. In it they feature two human-like 3D printed characters that are about the size of a paper clip. They are walking around a city at night, looking for scraps such as cigarette butts, CDs, and bubble wrap to use in order to construct a sail boat, in hopes of going “exploring”.

“The idea started with ‘What if we 3-D printed a music video,'” co-director Aramique Krauthamer explained. “Both Masa [Kawamura] (co-director) and I have done different kinds of stop-motion, and we had been discussing the possibility of creating a narrative where every frame of movement was 3-D printed and shot in the street. When we heard ‘We Are Explorers,’ we immediately began imagining this story of tiny 3-D printed characters running through the streets of a major city on an epic journey.”

Approximately 200 different 3D printed figurines were used in the video, to show the characters in different positions. The running scenes alone required 8 different printed characters. While they appear to be printed on a glow-in-the-dark green filament, they were actually printed using a yellow, UV-reactive plastic. During the filming process, a black light was used in order to make them glow.

“We wanted it to be tactile; to feel like a real adventure,” said Masa Kawamura. “We felt we could accomplish this by creating a tangible character that we would shoot outside on location in every place. The scale of the real world was always very important to the story in order to show this feeling of being tiny in a huge, overwhelming world. We also wanted to take the idea of being explorers quite literally for our process, and throw ourselves into a new kind of filmmaking adventure.”

Cut Copy is a well known Electronic band, that has been nominated for several prestigious awards. In 2012, they were nominated for a Grammy award for ‘Best Dance/Electronica Release’, and in 2011, they won the ARIA award for ‘Best Dance Release’.

The band has also made all of the 3D designs for all the character poses available as part of a BitTorrent Bundle. Also available as part of the bundle is the music video, a storyboard, and more.

“Our goal with BitTorrent is to hand everything over to the public: our storyboards, stop-motion technical plans, and the 3D files for every figurine. We want to see what they do with it,” explained the band. “Even if people just print the eight figurines that make up the running sequence, there’s so much they can do and so many places the story can go.”

Surely this won’t be the last music video to feature 3D printed characters or items. What do you think about this video? Discuss at 3DPrintBoard.