Hot Chip 'Bath Full of Ecstasy' by Oliver Payne
Ned Botwood - 9th Sept 2019
“Let’s-a Go!” Oliver Payne directs this delightful tribute to ’80s retro gaming, in which Hot Chip are the greatest game you never got to play.
Oliver Payne takes us on a tour of a fictional platform game, “Hot Chip: Bath Full of Ecstasy”, a Japanese curio that never got an American release. Based around a handful of Japanese set-pieces, the game itself has a typically inscrutable narrative featuring bubblebath fairies, soda and briefcase-slinging businessmen.
Payne lovingly creates this sprightly world around the band. Then has the tenacity to build outwards! Using a gawky YouTube review as a framing device - convincingly performed by Vincent Measures - he assembles game footage, stock video, rare photos and fragments of history into a retrospective of this fictional oddity.
Payne - visual artist, friend of the band and frequent collaborator - recreates the style of both game and review in meticulous depth. Between the pixellated sprites and the flat, dingy lighting of the gaming Vlog, you could be forgiven for believing Payne’s fictional conceit. Watching it produces the same warm, eerie sense of constructed nostalgia as Simpsonwave videos. Hot Chip have a well-established universe and identity, but this jewell-toned, 16-bit reverie sits so comfortably alongside their other work, it is a wonder nobody has attempted it before.
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Ned Botwood - 9th Sept 2019
Credits
Production/Creative
- Director
- Oliver Payne
- Producer
- Christo Arsenio
- Production Company
- S
- Production Company
- Safecrackers
- Production Company
- Safecrackers x Somesuch
- Executive Producer
- Tim Nash
Camera
- Director of Photography
- Luka Bazeli
Casting
- Lead actor
- Vincent Measures
Animation
- Animation Company
- Chop Studio
Editorial
- Editor
- Ben Crook
Grading
- Colourist
- Tim Smith
VFX
- Post production company
- C
Misc
- Graphic design
- Matt Sahlit
- Sound Mix
- Peter Lapinski
Other credits
Starring
Tatsuya Saito
Special Thanks
Money Mark, Keiichi Tanaami and Taku Onoda
Ned Botwood - 9th Sept 2019