A music video without dialogue, centred around a folk tale as old as time - on paper, King of Sea is not Short of the Week material. But this animation is a little miracle which delivered the most beautiful, tender and haunting 5 minutes our curatorial team has seen in a while, leaving us utterly spellbound.

Directed by Stéphane Berla and animated in collaboration with Parisian studio Brunch, today’s S/W feature is the music video for the track King Of Sea by French post-rock band Kwoon. With a unique cinematic aesthetic and textural character design, the visuals interweave emotional depth into every note and a melancholic meaning to every lyric with stunning and heartrending results. King of Sea both charms and unnerves the audience and takes residence in our minds, where, much like a dark maritime legend or an ancient curse, it lives on long after the story ends.

"The more I listen to this song, the more I feel overwhelmed by its emotion"

Inspired by Celtic legends and stories about the supposedly cursed lighthouse of Tévennec, King of Sea follows a fisherman, and father, who goes off to sea never to return to his wife and young son. Years later the boy, now a grown man and a dad himself, feels the same pull of the open water, and he too leaves his family in search of answers. What he finds, however, is far more sinister than he ever imagined.

Berla first discovered Kwoon at a music festival and immediately felt like they shared the same taste for macabre and poetic storytelling. A few years and collaborations later, the two had the opportunity to work together on Kwoon’s latest track "This project is very close to my heart for so many reasons” - the director shared with S/W - “The more I listen to this song, the more I feel overwhelmed by its emotion, its power and its poetic and cinematographic aura. Sandy and Mathias' (Kwoon) lyrics inspired me to write a story that I imagine as a Breton legend that sailors would tell each other on stormy nights, and this strong story deserves an ambitious and innovative visual approach".

[caption id="attachment_36772" align="alignnone" width="640"] King of Sea Kwoon Video Stephane Berla

Created in VR software Quill, Berla is always looking to push boundaries in his animation[/caption]

To critique the video separately from the track and vice versa would be a serious oversight because the two are so tightly bound together and ultimately work because of one another. The vocals becomes the narration and the music the score to the fishermen's story, whereas the visuals ground the ambiguous lyrics by giving them a solid meaning. Adding to the haunting undercurrent that makes the piece a modern classic is the unique style of the animation, achieved by combining VR illustration tool Quill with Blender 3D software. The result has the tactile fragility of stop-motion animation, the expressiveness of 2D and the freedom of movement and lighting only possible to create in 3D CGI.

Besides the technical wizardry, King of Sea is impressive because despite the limitations that come with telling a story through a music video, it still touches the heart and makes us search for the reasons why it has done so. After my own self reflection, I have released that I fell in love with it because of its poignant depiction of just how fleeting life is and more pointedly, how fragile we all are. For this reason King of Sea is not just a masterclass in innovative animation techniques, it’s a masterpiece.

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