Lamar+Nik Make ‘Half A Million’ Stickers For The Shins

Filmmaking is a time-consuming, tricky business. Regardless of how ‘guerrilla’ the shoot may be or how demanding the turnaround may appear, it’s pretty much impossible to get something amazing up on screen without putting in the time.

However, it’s not often the time-consuming elements are as ‘on-screen’ as for the video for The Shins’ latest single ‘Half A Million’. Not content with filming the band knocking out the song conventionally, directing duo Lamar+Nik (Agile Films) took white-backdrop performance footage, printed it out and then set about piecing together a 40+ location shoot… with 5,566 hand-cut stickers.

Animated by layering the stickers on top of each other at each location, the result is a playful, exhilarating combination of endless imagination and tactile determination. We were delighted throughout its 3 1/2 minute runtime, so grabbed Lamar+Nik to quiz them on the creation of a vid that really stuck with us.

First things first, kudos – that must have taken you bloody ages!

Yes, it did! From the day we started preproduction to delivery was about 2 months.

How did you get involved with the project?

Our US rep, Jen Herrera (Las Bandas), sent the track our way from Columbia Records.

Had you tried out the ‘printing thousands of stickers’ technique before pitching it? Was it an idea that had been percolating for a while?

We’ve had the stickers idea for as long as we can remember, but it’s one of those ideas that needs a specific type of song and needs a band/management/label that’s willing to wait a little extra time for us to make it. It’s not exactly the type of idea you can bang out in a weekend. The Shins and their team saw the value in waiting for this one and we’re grateful that we were able make this video for them.

What was the pre-production process? Did you have all of the sticker-placement scenarios planned out beforehand or was there any trial and error?

The first step was shooting the performance on a white background. The band had already started their tour so we had to meet them in Vancouver, BC. They were extremely tired but they were also really hyped on the idea so they charged right through all the performance takes and we got them out of there as fast as possible so they could sleep.

Then we had to edit the video. Once the edit was locked we were able to spit out all the frames and take it to the printers. After that we started the cutting process, which is basically us hand cutting each frame non-stop for several days with the help of some friends and family that still put up with us and these projects that usually take over someone’s house for a while. We split the video into each “shot” and you would just grab that whole stack and cut a sticker out, write the frame number on the back, then start a “finished” stack.

We went into the project with a list of scenarios for the stickers, so we purposely got certain angles of the band when we shot them. That list didn’t cover everything and also some things changed. We didn’t actually finalize those scenarios until we were locking down the performance edit. That was sort of the only way it would work. Definitely some trial and error, we had to come up with one or two of them on the fly.

How was the shoot with the band? Did they get the concept straight away?

When we met the band, that was the first time we were actually talking to them about the idea so we didn’t know what to expect but it turned out that they were really hyped on it. As we went through some of the shots, we explained ways that we were going to use the different angles. That definitely deepened their understanding of what we could do with the idea.

The film has the kind of playful invention we love from directors like Michel Gondry. Were there any major influences on the film? How did you come up with the sticker placements?

There weren’t any direct influences for the stickers music video, but it’s funny because some people thought the stickers video was by Michel Gondry. We kind of took that as a compliment, but Gondry along with a bunch of other things influence our work. It’s interesting for us to take something mundane like stickers and make people look at them in a completely different way.

The sticker placements are a combo of little ideas we’ve had laying around for ages and newer ideas that happened after we shot the performance and realized what we could do with the different angles we shot.

Once it came to the actual shoot, did you run into any problems? Were there any sticker mishaps?

Definitely had some problems. There was only one time that we had to re-print something. Thankfully we stopped before we finished the whole shot and only had to re-print part of a section. There were definitely some times when we’d run headlong into the limitations of what we were doing but we’d just come up with another way to do it.

The only other glaring problem that comes to mind was the heat. We were shooting in Oklahoma which was in the upper 90s. If you see an exterior shot in the video you can rest assured that we’re sweating like crazy, most likely in the blazing sun.

The stickers are shot in 40+ locations. At any point did you think ‘we may have been a bit ambitious here’?

We changed up our planned locations a couple of times for some of the scenes to better fit with our schedule. Some of them could be changed pretty easily, and we’d do that so we didn’t have to drive back and forth across town. The locations weren’t necessarily the hard part, it was more the time that each scene took. Some of the scenes that we thought were going to be easy ended up being the longest ones to create. Turns out it takes a long time to carefully stick down stickers so that they match exactly (in most cases) the frame before it.

The puzzle scene is a good example of that. We had to scratch or at least press into all the grooves with a pen for each frame after we stuck it down, then cut out the corner piece. After that we’d put the piece back into the puzzle, rinse and repeat.

The two checkers shots took eight hours alone and we started at 6pm, getting us out of there at 2am.

One of the neat aspects of the film is the sight of the numbers on each sticker and the hands placing them. Were you always keen on having a tactile, ‘look at how we made this’ aspect to the vid or was it more a ‘look at how much work this is!’ cry for help? ;-)

Haha. Part of the original idea, when we came up with it years ago, was to have hands showing up throughout the video and the stickers always travelling across the ground. Once we made the test video for the treatment we sent in, we realized that it would be nauseating to have both of those elements at the same time. That’s why you see the “travelling” stickers and the hands both in the video, but separate. We also started thinking of the different scenarios and having hands popping in and out would be distracting. The final version of the concept ended up a bit more elegant.

That being said, we really did want to add in a few elements here and there so you have a reminder of just how handmade the video is.

Did change much in post / the edit?

Not really. And that’s how most of our videos are, we like to meticulously plan up front so we’re confident with it and when you get to the computer it’s mostly drag and drop.

The video got better once on the computer because while we were shooting we would drop each scene into place and put rough masks on it. That way we could make sure the scenes worked without having to finalize the edit between each shot. After we were done shooting we were able to tighten everything down and make it look like it does today.

Do you fancy another job that involves this much cutting out?

If we ever do another print-every-frame-and-cut type of video again, we’d like to hire a team of people to help. Or a team of machines. Either one.

What’s up next for you?

We’re about half way through making our next video. We’ll leave it as a surprise but you should be able to see the amount of work that’s going into it, just like you can with this one.