A stop-motion music video has found new life on Reddit where a lengthy discussion has erupted over its authenticity.
The video game inspired video “Insert coin” opens with Swedish artists Daniel Larsson and Tomas Redigh organizing coins on a large piece of black cloth. As quirky arcade music revs up, the coins take on a life of their own, creating 3D scenes inspired by Super Mario Bros., Pacman ad Dance Dance Revolution.
The intricate scenes turned Redditors into sleuths in search of the truth. Their lively discourse helped the re-post collect 268 comments and more than 2,000 upvotes. The video made it to Reddit’s front page Tuesday.
“This is fake, pause the video at any one point and place your cursor over one of the ‘coins’ before continuing. You’ll be pleasantly surprised that the coin you’ve marked is always in the exact same place when its ‘activated,’ wrote Crunxman.
“Dunno where the idea came from that it was fake,” wrote Deracination. “They show you how it was done at the end and show that it’s a very fluid, quick process. It wouldn’t take any huge amount of time, relatively.”
Little did these Redditors know that this was the sort of response Redigh had in mind when he created the piece last fall.
“When you have done something that people can’t believe in, than you have succeeded,” Redigh said in an email interview with the Daily Dot.
Redigh did not specifically answer when asked if they had used special effects in the video. Instead, he explained the elaborate stop-motion process.
The video took seven weeks to plan and shoot, Redigh said. True to stop-motion animation, both men took turns moving the coins slowly around the floor then stopped to take a photo. All in all, they used about 3,000 photos, shot at 25 frames per second, to create the entire piece, Redigh said.
The music in the video was inspired by a lifetime of playing videos games on the Nintendo Entertainment System, Sega Master System and Sega Genesis, Redigh said.
“We try to find the retro sound, not necessarily the exact same sounds as on the games, but (similar) so you get the feeling but still a touch of our own sound. Then Daniel usually starts to do some crazy loops and then we make a song out of it,” Redigh said. “The music is very important for the result.”
Larsson and Redigh, who call themselves Rymdreglage (or Ninja Moped), are YouTube famous for their video “8-bit trip,” another stop-motion piece which uses Legos. The video has been seen about 10 million times.
The pair is currently working on stop-motion video using plaster and hope to make a war movie in the near future, Redigh said.
But for now, Redditors are left to ponder about the coins.
“Fake or not, this is pretty bad-ass,” wrote waelwulfas. “It’s almost a shame that some errors would have made it more believable, but that’s the interwebz. You still get an upvote from me.”
