European glam rockers Tokio Hotel, winner of Best New Artist at the American MTV Video Music Awards, hired Wicked Pixels director Craig Wessels to create the music video for Automatic, the first single off their soon-to-be-released album, Humanoid.

Just four days after release, the video was Youtube’s most watched video in over 10 countries, with over a million views. It’s in regular rotation on MTV, who heaped praise on the video, calling Automatic “a big-league beast of a video… The bar has been raised…The most moving robot story since Wall-E.”

Craig was asked to pitch through UK-based Joyrider Films, who had been impressed by his ability to mix live action and animation in his award-winning Stickies spot for MTN. Wicked was sent the song and the lyrics, being given a day to come up with a storyline and treatment.

“I basically just took muscle cars and deserts and robots and the sort of things that I think are cool,” Craig explains. “We wanted to create this future retro Mad Max scene, with the band driving through the desert in their musclecars. They arrive at a desert location that is essentially a graveyard for outdated warrior-class robots. While the band performs within this scrapyard-type location, two of the robots start to power up. They had been lovers during the war. At first, they’re not sure who each other are, so they want to fuck each other up because they’re programmed to kill, but then they realise who they are and slowly come together. But the song lyrics are about a girl falling out of love with a guy, where all her reactions are becoming automatic. Towards the end, the robots come together to kiss and you’re wondering if they will repair their relationship, but then she turns away and it’s left unresolved.”

With some pretty intensive live action performance required, Craig assembled his crew and brought in DOP Rob Malpage. The aerial work was flown by helicopter pilot Gert Uys from Airborne Camera Experts (ACE) capturing some truly “unreal” locations, in the words of androgynous lead singer Bill Kaulitz, who fitted the science fiction landscape perfectly.

The opening aerial scenes were shot in the Richtersveld, on the border of Namibia, while the performance was shot in the Tankwa Karoo, where art director Glen Wolter was involved in Africa Burns, the South African version of the Burning Man festival. “We were able to use these huge sculptures they’d set up for the festival, which they burnt two weeks later,” Craig says. They also shot in a pan just south of Verneukpan in the Northern Cape. Automatic was made before District 9 was released, but the design of the robots has a similar third-world science fiction style. “Because they were older robots abandoned after the wars, we designed them to look all scarred and neglected. It’s gritty and raw and real, not so spit and polished.”

They also consciously created robots that didn’t transform. “Because Transformers is so big at the moment, we decided our robots would rather be purpose-built for fighting. They don’t change.” Creating robot romance “is tricky,” Craig admits, but they built in emotion through the robot’s movements and the use of slowmotion. “It’s difficult to get emotion out of something without facial expressions, but that’s kind of the job of our talented animators,” Craig says.

One of the innovations within the video is the way Wicked have worked the band’s brand into the images. “The Humanoid ring was Bill’s idea, so we can’t take credit for that,” Craig says, “But when we designed the robots, we had the idea of building the band’s logo into the face of the robots, which they loved.”

Despite the rapturous response the video has received on MTV, Craig hasn’t sent Automatic to Shots or Boards yet, because he’s still working on a director’s cut. “We were under massive time constraints so we never got it to the point that we could have,” Craig says. “We had 10 days to do the animation and ideally we would have liked two months. We only had one day and night to composite the whole job, so there’s a whole lot of crafting that we’re still busy with. When we’re finished, we’ll submit that.”

Wicked may be best known as one of South Africa’s most award-winning animation and visual effects studios, but they have evolved into a director-based production company specialising in film and CGI integration.

With support from the vast experience and resources of their studio, Craig was sixth in 2009 AdReview’s list of the top ten most awarded commercials directors, one below stable-mate Andrew Shaw. Gavin Coetzee and Hennie Blaauw complete the current director’s line-up.

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Watch the music video here.

Kevin Kriedemann