Passion Pit “Sleepyhead”

Passion Pit’s break out song “Sleepyhead” received well garnered praise. So when French Kiss records tasked The Wilderness to bring light an shape to the hit song we eagerly obliged. We based our direction and design on Laszlo Maholy-Nagy’s light space modulator. There is a vibrant parallel between the vaulting arpeggios and falsetto bursts of “Sleepyhead” and the fractured light of Maholy-Nagy’s rotating metal and glass sculpture. But first we had to speed things up to match the melodic frenzy of “Sleepyhead”. First we shot Michael against a black background. Then we cut the footage with perfected mouth movements – exported the stills to get printed at CVS! We then glued and shot each individual still on a rotating rig with a mirrored base. We achieve a haunting yet subtle play of light that we embellish with in camera effects using baby powder, dust and glitter. And, as the chorus of the song arrives we capture the melodic tension with a rotating melange of stop-motion and time delay techniques with mesmerizing results.