Synopsis

London Grammar perform in a stark, shadowy space while bodies appear to hang, tumble, and hover in midair around them. Hannah Reid's still, emotionally focused presence contrasts with the ghostly movement of the other figures, creating the sensation of people trapped inside fragments of time. The monochrome imagery and restless shifts in perspective give the song's reflections on lost youth a dreamlike, haunted quality. Rather than presenting a conventional narrative, the video turns suspended motion, isolation, and repetition into a visual meditation on memory and emotional paralysis.

Factoids & Trivia

• The video was released on May 15, 2013, ahead of London Grammar's debut album, If You Wait.

• Its "bullet time" effect was created with a custom-built rig containing 625 individual pinhole cameras. The cameras were arranged around the performers so that the action could be captured from many viewpoints at once.

• The production was shot on 35mm film rather than digitally. Powerful studio flashes were needed because pinhole photography requires a great deal of light, while the performers' movement still had to be frozen.

• Loading the rig was a major practical challenge. Seven or eight people fed strips of 35mm film into it in complete darkness to avoid exposing the stock.

• The crew did not know whether the process had worked until the film was developed. They processed the exposed strips themselves in large buckets, a job that reportedly took about two hours.

• The rig's images did not initially align correctly with the telecine equipment. The rushes were therefore run through the machine four times, with the film advanced by one perforation on each pass.

• Although it used 35mm stock, the final setup effectively captured a 16mm-sized frame in a vertical 9:16 orientation before the images were assembled into the finished video.

• The video received a nomination for Best Visual Effects in a Video at the 2013 UK Music Video Awards.