The video for Australian indie band Hudson's song Against the Grain is a fun piece of stop-motion animation using a whole ton of sharp pencil crayons; I thought the pencil/graphic equalizer stuff was very nice, and looks technically challenging to pull off!

Hudson - Against The Grain (via Reddit)

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I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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Nick Cheatham

Is there anything stop motion video capture can’t make look awesome?
Cardinal Biggles

I wonder if this was inspired by Melbourne (Australia) artist John Brack’s ‘pencils and pens’ series of paintings?
zotlerg

Perhaps the pencils in the graphic equaliser diplay have actually been rendered on the computer, and created automatically. Easy enough to do. Shame to even suggest that of course. : )
- rrh
  
  What I would probably do is generate a video of the equalizer on computer just as a simple bar graphs, project that frame-by-frame on the working surface and move the pencils to line up with the projected image.
  
  To me, the more impressive bits, technically, would be the pyramid of pencils, (imagine having to carefully add those one at a time without breaking the pyramid) and changing the background before and after the “zipper” action.
http://disqus.com/Kimmoth/ Kimmo

Sweet clip.

pencil/~~graphic equalizer~~ stuff

Spectrum analyser. This is a GEQ: http://visual.merriam-webster.com/images/communications/communications/sound-reproducing-system/graphic-equalizer.jpg
jambon

Great clip but what’s a pencil crayon? Aren’t these just coloured pencils? Aren’t crayons something else?
- KanedaJones
  
  a Canadianism. He may also use any or all of the following.. http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-be-Canadian/step5/How-to-talk-Canadian/
  
  the thing to note from your question though is your use of U in color. meaning UK or Australia? (or a part of Canada that doesn’t say pencil crayon???)
Spiros Aliprantis

Very nice idea of the pencils! Really wonderful track too! :)
johnnee

Great idea and loved the spectrum analyser bit, but my favourite music video is the new Thomas Dolby one I saw on The BBc the other day: http://paul-d.tv/blog/2011/11/06/toadlickers-on-the-bbc/
agstfl

Stuff like the equalizer, indeed all of the animation, is fairly simple to time out and animate to using software like Dragon Stop Motion. You can onion skin a previs animation over the live feed from your camera to match motion.

Not to say that it isn’t still technically and creatively impressive, having a guide and the ability to playback your progress on the fly and so forth makes things easier, but not easy.
CountZero

Lovely video, just made me smile. Track’s good, too.
JPW

The first six seconds of the track are the most redeeming ones. . . .

Stop motion music video with pencil crayons

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