David Barlow-Krelina adapts short film ‘Caterpillarplasty’ for Moist music video ‘Tarantino’
Tarantino is the first new release from Canadian band Moist since their 2014 album Glory Under Dangerous Skies, recorded remotely during lockdown across Toronto and Montreal.
The song, which “tells a story of a life of meaningless excess”, is accompanied by the grotesque and hallucinatory visuals of the National Film Board of Canada‘s sci-fi/horror short Caterpillarplasty, re-edited by the film’s original director David Barlow-Krelina. The animation depicts a sterile vision of the future in which humanity’s penchant for cosmetic ‘improvement’ has taken a morbid turn. Taking full advantage of recent leaps forward in CG rendering technologies, the enhanced materiality of the characters and their manipulations of skin and flesh make for a stomach-churning but ultimately captivating dark satire on beauty standards and body modification.
The first lockdown sent me on a Quentin Tarantino binge and the song came out of a dream sparked by those images where we have lost all sense of ourselves—where there are no limits on our consumption and all we want is more. We deconstruct and reconstruct ourselves to fill an unfillable void and we just eat ourselves alive, and somehow, we still can’t wake up.
When I saw the long version of Caterpillarplasty, it fit perfectly with the vision for the song Tarantino. The endless desire to remodel and upgrade ourselves, hoping the remaking of our appearance will somehow solve our existential turmoil.
-David Usher, Moist
When David Usher first got in touch with me about making a Moist music video using footage from Caterpillarplasty, we started making connections between the film and his work in AI and with digital humans. I had initially conceived of the film in a way that relied heavily on music to set the emotional tone of the piece, so it was a great pleasure for me to reimagine the timing and the flow to an entirely different vibe.
-David Barlow-Krelina
Learn more about the original film in our 2018 interview with David Barlow-Krelina