In Masanobu Hiraoka’s music video for Max Cooper a single line become a thousand forms

To make his new album On Being, the London-based artist Max Cooper put one question out to the public online: “what do you want to express that you feel you can’t in everyday life?” The producer hadn’t expected much response, but when he took a look at the database of answers that had accumulated after some months he was “floored” by what people had submitted. ‘It was like finding a secret window into our collective psyche, and discovering amongst the chaos, pleasure and pain, so many experiences that we share at different times in our lives,’ he writes upon the entrance to the website he has developed for the project.

Letting all of these words from strangers build up over the last few years, this library of anonymous thoughts and feelings became the source material for an album that sought to capture some of what it means to be human. “Most of the tracks on the album concern themselves with a single quote, but for one piece, I wanted to tackle the feeling of the whole collection,” the musician tells It’s Nice That. “There’s so many beautiful, scary, funny, sad, horrific, mundane and absurd expressions of our shared humanity in there, there’s a very particular emotional impact of reading through the entire thing.”

That piece was On Being, a sound that started from the strings of Max’s musical collaborator Felix Gerbelot’s viola and slowly morphed into a melody that would turn the title track of the album. To transform this into something we could see, Max reached out to Tokyo-based director and animator Masanobu Hiraoka to create a music video that would frame the project in its entirety. Having worked with international artists including Battles, Flying Lotus, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Justice, both in Japan and abroad Masanobu has made a name for himself with his fluid and striking animation style that coils together even the more complex sounds and emotions.

Upon discovering the vulnerability people had shared to facilitate the album’s making, Masanobu was drawn to his own personal memories in response to the brief: “I decided to create the music video like it was a personal vlog – something I could link to my own memories and look back on years from now together with my child. In line with the album’s concept, I considered my animation as my own ‘answer’ to the interview question. I look forward to watching it with my child in the future,” the artist says.

The result is a soft, sprawling and emotive sequence of rotoscoped snapshots drawn frame by frame with pencil, that create a continuous flow of memories, all connected by a single line that looks like it never left the page. This natural sequence of forms wasn’t always the plan for Masanbou, however: “At first, I planned to create random cuts and gradually link them together. But as I worked, the concept itself evolved, and in the end, I focused more on vivid personal memories.” Once Masanbou had discarded a significant number of the initial edits for the video, the animations central focus slowly became footage of the animators own child. From here, he built his flow of drawing over family videos he’d captured to create his frames.

“I kept thinking about how to animate the transitions between those shots: watching the animation, then reviewing more footage, picking out what could connect, and animating those links,” he says. In between these personal memories Masanbou landed on sequences that feel like we are zooming in the very cells and organisms that build everything up – fitting visuals for Max, a musician that explores the intersections of music, art and science.

These transitory sequences that hold the music video together are a visual depiction of how “music and science are deeply connected, both as the study of patterns, one in sound and one in nature” Max ends. “Masanobu referenced these sorts of chemical and biological structures in his story, but mainly I love how these merge with moments of his life that are told openly and honestly. That open honest expression of what we are was exactly what I was searching for musically.”