The return of cult band The Postal Service with A Tattered Line Of String has prompted a suitably inventive and ingenious video by the clever folks of AC/CD/CD in which a put-upon man at a laundromat has his whole world turn into a tumble dryer. Then as he sinks into a sea of clothes, the idea goes outside, to a girl on a swing, and the world literally turns upside down...

It's an exercise by the French directors in classic camera trickery – but looks fresh as a daisy.  

AB/CD/CD:

"Actually Tony Kiewel from Subpop came to us because he was interested in having a visually strong music vid, and actually loved our Factory Floor one… As you can imagine, we where very thrilled about the idea of working with Sub Pop (and Postal Service!) as they delivered a few of the best albums ever. The brief was: do what you want…We panicked :)

"We already worked on the relationship between gravity and camera moves, this is something that we explored a bit in our a music video we did for Uffie. It was a small effect but we realized it could be developed into a whole music video. This is a camera trick as old as cinema actually. Our French master Meliès did it perfectly in his seminal camera work. We are so classic…

"Then we built a video around that trick. We looked for the right place to do it in a naturalistic cinematographic way. The coin laundry, a really boring place for us, made sense for a lot of reasons (narrative, aesthetic, technical). And then the swing scene added what we needed in terms of abstract storytelling and poetry. It allowed us to develop the visual trick at the same time.

"As the song was about a kind of couple we felt like shooting a beautiful loser (Danny Minnick) and a lovely girl (Mani Yarosh)...and that's it. It was kind of heavy in terms of post production, but Larkin Seiple's photography was really neat and MPC Los Angeles worked so well that it seems to be really easy at the end…"