Puppetry and a live action ocean made from cling film are combined with 2D animation in the music video for British band Coldplay's single Daddy.
Directed by Bristol-based animation studio Aardman's Ã…sa Lucander, the video tells the story of a girl longing for her father whilst lost at sea.
Lucander used the stylised movements of puppet theatre to reflect the girl's fragmented memories of her father, immersed in a digitally illustrated landscape.

Much of the video sequence was filmed in live action, rather than the stop-motion technique Aardman used in its Academy Award-winning Wallace & Gromit series.
Lucander has a background in illustration and animation. She told Dezeen that she combined the different animation styles so she could create a dream-like atmosphere to match the song. "[The project] gave me an opportunity to include different media and supported the sense of surrealness and magic that I was after," she said.

During the song's introduction, the young protagonist is rowing a boat in a moon-lit setting. Lucander interpreted the heartbeat-like rhythm at the beginning of the song as waves hitting the side of the boat.
To imitate the water's surface, the team layered strips of cling film on top of each other across a three-metre-wide square frame.
They gently pulled and tugged the film by hand from the corners to create the impression of waves.

The director revealed that animating the ocean was the biggest challenge, because she wanted to film a ...