Synopsis
Darwin Deez watches from the margins as a succession of seemingly perfect women move through glossy, cheerful stock-footage worlds. While couples meet, fall in love, marry, raise children, and enjoy polished everyday moments, Darwin remains an awkward outsider, unable to enter their reality. The song's rejection theme is played for absurdity: his lonely, increasingly frustrated presence clashes with the relentlessly optimistic imagery surrounding him. The result is a surreal, comic portrait of unrequited love assembled from corporate-style footage.
Factoids & Trivia
- The video was released in February 2013 alongside the single from Darwin Deez's album "Songs for Imaginative People."
- Its central visual device is the use of stock footage rather than conventional narrative scenes. Darwin is composited into a world of polished advertising imagery populated by happy couples, families, and aspirational lifestyles.
- The video's concept deliberately recontextualizes corporate b-roll. Images designed to communicate uncomplicated happiness become strange and faintly unsettling when paired with a song about exclusion and romantic frustration.
- The treatment also parodies the early-2010s style of online "found footage" and Tumblr videos, which often strung together supposedly cool or meaningful images without a conventional story.
- The production was handled by Caviar London. Helen Power produced the video, with Laura Tunstall serving as executive producer and Ben Fordesman as director of photography.
- Much of the humor comes from the quality of the compositing. Darwin appears to be physically present in footage that was originally created for unrelated commercial purposes, making him look both trapped inside and completely alien to the stock-footage world.
- The video was commissioned for Lucky Number Music and was widely noticed by music-video and visual-effects publications for its inventive use of stock material.
- The ending includes a deliberate false-out, extending the video's joke beyond what initially appears to be its conclusion.