"As The Waves was such a departure from the Villagers' previous records, we had steer away as far as we could from the feel of their other videos," says Alden. "It was a bit too obvious, visually speaking, to represent actual sea waves in the video, so I started toying with oscillator waveforms (square, sin, sawtooth etc...). I ran Conor's image through an oscillator-emulating plugin and programmed it to react to the beat of the song. I started running a lot of different visuals through that oscillator plugin, and also used the Rutt Etra Video Synthesizer for some parts.

"The hardest part, I suppose, was trying to visually match the violence of the end of the song. The song covers a large specter of different intensities so i had to be careful not to go over the top, in the beginning and keep cinematic ammunition for the "all hell breaks loose" part, in the end. The retro-futuristic aspect acts as some kind of ironic underlining of the themes of the song...Natural disasters and existential distress are matters to be approached ironically, in my opinion. I think it's too redundant to just get sad about the human meaninglessness.

"The video was made in about three weeks, which is very little time for a five minute video containing a lot of animated elements, but the rush of the deadline, and the fear that you won't be able to meet it, seems to turn on the 'survival mode' in the artistic brain..."

http://www.youtube.com/watchv=Hoha8iET3us

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