Taylor Swift may still be grabbing headlines for her star-studded, is-it-feminist-is-it-not-feminist "Bad Blood" music video, but it's a new animated version of her music video for "Shake It Off" that has us seeing things a bit differently.
Swift's once-straightforward music video showing her attempting but ultimately failing to perform a variety of dance styles is transformed into a surreal four minutes with a hodgepodge of animation styles showing ballerinas with tentacles for arms, Swift as a green monster and twerkers with hamburger buns on their, well, buns.
The video has earned nearly 84,000 views on YouTube at the time of this writing since it was posted on May 15. It also caught the attention of Reddit this week.
This reimagined version of the "Shake It Off" music video was created by 49 students as part of their first assignment in an introductory animation class at the University of Newcastle in Australia. Each student used the rotoscoping technique in Photoshop, which involves tracing figures to be animated later, and then told to animate the set of frames assigned to them however they wanted, as long as they reflected the action on screen, filled the whole frame and did it by hand, the class' lecturer Jane Shadbolt told T-Lounge via email.
The result is at times reminiscent of a-ha's "Take On Me" music video. At other times, it feels like those old Apple iPod commercials have been resurrected. However, it mostly feels like an experimental short that you would either see in a contemporary art museum or on Adult Swim. Altogether, it's mind blowing how something that looks so different frame-by-frame could feel so coherent.
Shadbolt said she chose "Shake It Off" for the assignment not only because the song and music video are "great" but also as far as something to actually animate goes, the video has a lot of "fast cuts and great movement with something happening in every frame," which gave all of the students some variety in the shots they worked with. The fact that not everyone in the class might be a Swiftie also inspired her choice.
"I also thought it would be loved and loathed in equal measure by everyone and controversy is always a win for me for a class exercise," Shadbolt said. "I know at least one death metal fan in the class was a kind of bummed by the choice."
The haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate.
Check out the full video below.
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GIF: Plastmatic Research Laboratory | YouTube
