Greg Barth directs Jack Sachs’ bizarre VR characters and bored office workers in latest video

Greg Barth has directed a music video for Red Axes’ song Sun Sweet Sun, featuring Jack Sachs characters who live out the VR fantasies of bored office workers.

The film follows the employees of an accounting firm at a very grey office party, where everyone ends up wearing VR headsets to escape their mind-numbing environment. Cutting between the IRL party and the fantastical alternate realities, the video is not only a hilariously cynical look at VR technology but a brilliant outlet for Jack’s surreal 3D animated character design. Starting out fairly innocent, Greg and Jack’s dark humour comes to the fore when the video takes a gruesome turn at the end.

“The idea of the film was to poke fun at the wild and bizarre use of VR that seems to be creeping into the industry,” says Jack. “There are so many VR gadgets and games that often don’t work properly and produce the kind of nightmares you see in our video. The song presented a blank canvas as there are no lyrics, so we got to push the boat out for the video.”

“Having worked on a 360 film before, I found that showing it to my friends with a headset was the funniest thing ever,” says Greg. “People tend to disconnect completely from reality and physical space, immersing themselves fully in something fake. I wanted to play on this specific moment of weakness, and since the track was quite punchy, I started imagining a terrible dance choreography performed by several people wearing VR, without even realising it.”

The video was produced by Blinkink and Phenomena Labs. Executive producer was Bart Yates and commissioner was Guy Dreifuss, with character design by Jack Sachs and CG by Blinkink Studio.