"We're thrown into existence, life bustles around us, we live, it's amazing, and then before we know it it's all gone," says Antony Barkworth-Knight, who's latest video for UK jazz outfit GoGo Penguin is an absorbing account of a man made of stones, who has to struggle through a harsh, bleak, mostly featureless world that has distinct parallels with our own.

It's a beautifully made animated piece that employed motion capture to achieve character movement, and was developed out of Gelator Visual Effects in Manchester, Barkworth-Knight's home town.

ANTONY BARKWORTH-KNIGHT:

"It all came about from thinking about the phrase 'a window on the world' and what that might look and feel like on an epic scale. The original test footage for the piece was created by filming iron filings on a macro lens in slow motion. Up close the individual filings looked like small boulders that would attract towards one another and build anthropomorphic beings. It seemed to have so much life in it.

"I worked with Gelato Visual Effects in Manchester to develop the visual style into landscapes of characters. We kept the environment sparse but added some minimal mountains in the distance to add scale to the shots.

"The animation for the central character was all motion captured at Gelato's studio which allowed us to create the video in a small amount of time.

"There's a lot of tech going on from simulations to character animation to rendering techniques. A big challenge was to balance all this tech somehow so it somehow vanished behind the minimal aesthetic and the narrative. Hopefully we got the balance right."