Building a reputation for creating vibrant visuals for a new generation of musicians, young North London directing collective Original Concrete Club have now tapped into the potential of old-school cutout animation with their second video for rising South London pop-R&B artist Cikho.

We join Cikho at a bus stop on a grey day, donning his headphones to play the soulful groove of his track Fell Again and losing himself in another dimension. It's a retro-fuelled, cartoonish version of reality, a mix of cutout animated live action and other elements, where Cikho and his buddy are out to impress a quartet of fun-loving local girls.

The young members of OCC have been honing their craft in the couple of years, making videos for Harlen Jackson, Ives Missing and several more newcomer artists. They reveal that they were fascinated by the potential of the cutout animation aesthetic - but perhaps less prepared for the several weeks of work that this required.

"Coming off the back of our previous video with Cikho for Deja Vu, we knew the next video had to push the world around Cikho even further," say OCC. "The idea was built on Cikho putting on a pair of headphones and dropping into a more colourful, surreal version of reality. It felt like a natural way to visualise that feeling of getting lost in music.

"Originally, we only planned to use scanned paper textures and ripped edges for the backgrounds. But once we saw how good they looked, we committed to building the entire video around that aesthetic. 

"That decision ended up taking over 350 hours. We printed more than 300 sheets, ripped every frame by hand, mounted them onto green card, and masked everything frame-by-frame to keep the animation smooth. This totaled into over 3000 individual, ripped paper elements.

"In the end, the amount of work was ridiculous, but it gave the video a look and feel we couldn't have achieved any other way."