Today I get to tell the story behind No Such Thing, the music video for the lead single from Deniz Cuylan’s new album. Here’s the video so you can watch it before I tell you the backstory:
Deniz’s contemplative music is a perfect reflection of my “beauty hides in plain sight” mantra. To me, that’s what the No Such Thing video is about, rediscovering the beauty around us, hidden in the ordinary. When you pay attention, beautiful things jump out of the invisible background of our lives and comes into focus.
The short film is made up of 741 pictures of ordinary objects. The themes flip between 16 organic and urban objects. My process involved exploring Colorado in search of things that could be stitched together to tell a story. When I found something promising I would circle it trying to align the pictures by hand as closely as I could. Then back on my computer I meticulously aligned each photo so that they stitched together perfectly.
The first time I made one of these 360 degree animations was in 2008. I was working at an advertising agency trying to figure out a way to make RVs worth looking at. I wanted to make them spin but they don’t make turntables big enough. The solution was to park the RV and take photos in a circle around it. After aligning the photos together the giant boxes appeared to “spin.” To prove to myself the idea was feasible, I went outside and took photos of my Toyota Corolla. Here’s what that very first experiment looked like:
The challenge with this technique is that each frame has to be aligned as close as possible to the photo before/after it to make the spin smooth. If you don’t want backgrounds, each object has to be manually cut out. The process quickly becomes very time consuming. After clipping hundreds of RVs out of their backgrounds I burnt out on the technique. But I kept the idea in the back of my mind, waiting for the right opportunity to try it again.
Fast forward to 2026… There’s a silo in my town of Loveland, Colorado that you can see for miles in any direction. It was the perfect object to revive my old technique. I spent a day walking around the silo, aligned the images, and posted it on Instagram.
People liked the results. One of the people who saw my silo animation was Deniz Cuylan who was working on his third solo album, For Luca. He reached out and we brainstormed ideas for how we could use the technique for a music video.
The inherent flaws in the handheld camera technique has an unsettling quality to it. The imperfection of the alignment, the jitter caused by time gaps... your brain has to work a bit. It is both satisfying and uncomfortable.
His new album was created after Deniz lost his dog, Luca. As we brainstormed we imagined the camera representing the point of view of a dog, circling the objects with energy, glad to be outside and spending time with its companion. I think that’s a lovely metaphor.
My favorite part of the video is the section with the cell phone tower. The video started with a stick, cycled through trees, before landing on this “man-made tree,” the invisible object powering the devices that keep us indoors and lonely.
If you liked the music video I encourage you to follow Deniz and dig deeper into his music.
Thanks for making it to the end of my story. If you aren’t already following me on Instagram, that’s the best place to catch my unorthodox experiments the moment they roll out. It’s an honor to exist in your inbox and feeds. If you like what I’m doing, a likes/share/re-stack goes a long way to helping people like you find people like me. Stay creative.
Your friend,
Ade
best use of the gif format!
Nice work Ade.