1,200 Hand-Painted Frames for Ralf Hildenbeutel’s ‘Disco’

The video for Ralf Hildenbeutel’s track Disco was built from more than 1,200 individually hand-painted frames. The director Boris Seewald used rotoscoping — translating live footage into hand-drawn stills by way of a projector or transparencies — to turn the movements of the dancers Althea Corlett and Simone Schmidt into drawings and paintings, scene by scene.

Despite the wild variety of media across hundreds of sketches, the frame-to-frame continuity does something clever: instead of breaking the illusion, it amplifies the dancers’ motion, so the roughness reads as energy. Seewald animated it with Mina and Mihwa Seewald, filmed by Georg Simbeni, and the lineage it belongs to runs from Disney’s Snow White and Peter Pan to A-ha’s Take On Me.

More: Boris Seewald · Ralf Hildenbeutel.