Her Morning Elegance - Oren Lavie

Her Morning Elegance is moderately unique music video by being filmed primarily in the form of stop motion. Stop motion is the method of taking numerous still shots and then quickly streaming them one after another, creating the appearance of moving inmate objects. While sounding simple it is far from the truth; Her Morning Elegance consisted of roughly 3225 still images. Taking these shots spanned a period of 4 weeks where the characters were represented by 3D dummies. Frame by frame it only took a shocking 2 days for the live actors to replace the dummies.

While the technique’s used to create this video via animation and stop motion is very impressive it extremely reduced the ability to use different angled shots or ranges of distance. This is due to the unfortunate reality of the editing procedure. To produce a smooth moving stop motion video the camera must remain stationary. Thus this meant we only see a minimal amount of shot types yet on the plus side we have a firm establishing shot at the beginning of the sequence displaying the master shot as well as a brief array of close ups of the protagonist introducing you to the character.

The music video itself is run through via an impressionist narrative with a seemingly unrelated array of different areas within the protagonists dream sequence. This uniqueness and slight childish feeling as well as the calm and almost eerie folk track draw the audience in. The simplicity of the video with the ability to easily distinguish between the different scenes, such as the dark blue bed sheet representing the sea and the white socks representing fish, also adds to the character of the video.

The technique’s and narrative employed in this video are both of quality that will attract a broad audience due to the humour, such as the socks as fish or shirts as birds, as well as the aesthetic appeal of the surroundings by having them as a simple bedroom. A feel-good factor is also employed by reminding us all that no matter the dream good or bad we always wake up after it in our comfy bed to the blazing sun.