The Beautiful Video for David Gilmour’s “The Girl in the Yellow Dress,” Featuring 9,000 Hand-Drawn Frames of Animation

The ani­mat­ed video for David Gilmour’s “The Girl in the Yel­low Dress” opens on a sax­o­phon­ist with a famil­iar story—one so well-known to his band­mates they can read it on his face. But then the per­spec­tive shifts, and we fol­low instead the woman (or “girl”) of his woes, as she comes to see him play, gets ogled and turned into a fan­ta­sy by the men in the club, pur­sues the res­i­dent lothario, crush­ing the hearts of them all, includ­ing the sax­o­phon­ist, who plays his blues instead of col­laps­ing into a drink.

At least that seems to be the sto­ry, a typ­i­cal nightlife scene ren­dered in a very dynam­ic, atyp­i­cal way. The video, from a track off Gilmour’s 2015 album Rat­tle that Lock, was direct­ed by Dan­ny Mad­den for Ornana Films, who write, “The music video is made of about 9,000 frames of ani­ma­tion that were touched by sev­er­al hands to get the lay­ered con­tours, vibrant col­ors, and exag­ger­at­ed char­ac­ter design of old French Lith­o­graph posters. We want­ed to cre­ate a mov­ing ver­sion of that look, as if each frame had all the lay­ers stamped on the page.”

An incred­i­ble amount of inten­sive artis­tic labor went into cre­at­ing the boozy, swirling effects in each scene. “We ani­mat­ed with pen­cil, then con­tour lines were gone over with a brush tip mark­er. We used gouache to get nice life in the vary­ing brush­strokes, then we lay­ered the con­tours over the paint lay­er in the com­posit­ing step so that the colours would do inter­est­ing things when they ran togeth­er.” Maybe these images could be recre­at­ed con­vinc­ing­ly with dig­i­tal effects… but I sus­pect not.

The song “looks back at [Gilmour’s] ear­li­est musi­cal influ­ence,” writes a Guardian review of the Rat­tle that Lock. If so, it’s a nascent influ­ence that did not emerge often in his Pink Floyd play­ing, though the song may also indi­rect­ly pay trib­ute to the jazz-trained Richard Wright, memo­ri­al­ized else­where on the album. You can see sev­er­al more scenes from this extra­or­di­nary video at Dezeen.

via Laugh­ing Squid 

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

David Gilmour Talks About the Mys­ter­ies of His Famous Gui­tar Tone

How Pink Floyd’s “Com­fort­ably Numb” Was Born From an Argu­ment Between Roger Waters & David Gilmour

Watch Tom Waits For No One, the Pio­neer­ing Ani­mat­ed Music Video from 1979

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness