A spontaneously-made video for "Jigsaw Falling Into Place," from Radiohead's new album "In Rainbows," is making the rounds on the Internet. It's essentially a performance-based video built around one oddball effect: As the band members play in the studio, their heads remain perfectly still while their bodies move and shift beneath them in unsettling ways.
That's the result of a "helmet cam," according to director Adam Buxton, who explains in a posting on his Website:
"It’s a mini surveillance camera mounted on the front of a bicycle helmet which makes the head of the wearer appear stationary while everything around them slides around nauseatingly. It’s a technique that’s been used a lot (Martin Scorcese and Peter Gabriel spring to mind), but it always occurred to me that the bike helmet version might be good for some kind of music video."
According to Buxton, he and his assistant Garth Jennings shot the video in just a couple of takes at the band's residential studio in the Oxford countryside. "After supper Garth and I loaded everything onto a laptop and it looked great," he writes. "We stayed up til 2.30am chopping the footage from the 5 cameras together and when we were finished it looked pretty good."
The video eventually became part of a Webcast aired at Radiohead.tv last month.
Check it out here: