Today, The Wytches share the music video for new single C-Side. The band teamed up with animatronics artist John Nolan for the latest visual. John’s film CV includes Harry Potter, Where the Wild Things Are and Warhorse. He has also worked on animatronic projects for Lady Gaga, James Lavelle and Bjork, as well as directing music videos for UNKLE and Lamb. Talking about the new video, John said:

“The Wytches are a top band and I wanted to work with them since hearing the first album. A lot of their previous films were shot low res and feature the band and their friends dressing up and messing about, I wanted to honourthis but introduce some sort of narrative and creature fx. I wanted to play around with the human form and create something that looked normal from one angle but growing into something completely freakish as the camera moves across it. Elongating the neck proved to do this brilliantly and it led me to research into Rokurokubi, a type of Japanese apparition where the human head leaves the body stretching out the neck. The act of the head separating from the body represents the spirit’s soul wandering.

The band we’re completely open minded and gave me their full blessing so we committed to the idea. I’d worked with Conor Craig-Stephens before as he was the lead creature in The Hallow, I knew he would be perfect as our guy. We spent 5 weeks at the studio building a full mechanical animatronic human head with the long neck blending into something that Conor could wear. The face was controlled by two puppeteers using radio control transmitters and the head and neck movements performed by either by Conor or lead puppeteer Rob Tygner. The film uses a number of effects disciplines including animatronics, puppetry, motion control camera work, rod removal and a full cgi neck animation in the final outro, so with a very low budget it was ambitious to say the least.”

C-Side, recorded by Luke Oldfield at Toe Rag Studios, is from their forthcoming album All Your Happy Life, out Friday September 30th on Heavenly Recordings.

The Wytches are: Kristian Bell (vocals, guitar), Daniel Rumsey (bass), Gianni Honey (drums) and Mark Breed (guitar, organ).

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