Animal Collective – Bridge to Quiet

Music video for ‘Bridge to Quiet’ by Animal Collective, to celebrate the first year anniversary of the EP with the same name.

This visual started with a simple image in mind: the steps of a giant in sync with the song’s drumbeat.

To capture the noisy intro of the song we used the first minutes of the video to explore the island, which is in a really bad shape (possibly humans’ fault?), and the awakening of our main character, the giant, who is super colorful and full of life. As he sees a new island in the distance, one in a better shape, he walks in that direction, until he realizes that his pet friends can’t go along, which leads him to make the decision to become the bridge for them to this new home.

This EP was recorded by the band during lockdown and some of the sounds and the artwork evoked a bit of the struggle that comes with that situation, and the band also always had a strong connection with nature, so by thinking about those factors, we found the perfect place for our giant to live: on a desert island, floating in the ocean, but with the company of some friendly animals on his side.

This was our biggest project to date and we wanted to treat it like a short animation movie, giving a little color to an otherwise dark subject, and trying to visually capture what maybe makes Animal Collective’s music so intriguing: always seeing our world as a source of inspiration and with a sense of wonder.