Young Rival’s Elevator video was digitally shot and edited,w hich every frame of a digital video was reproduced on Oki Data Turboline 320 dot matrix printers before being scanned back into a computer to create an epic moving image. Conceptually the video was heavily inspired by the work of Canadian animation pioneer Norman McLaren – specifically his work Pas De Deux.
Young Rival bassist and music video director John Smith tells The Creators Project how the idea for the video came about: “One day a few years ago, I was reminiscing about the technology that I grew up with and specifically a memory I had of printing images on my family’s old dot matrix printer. It might seem funny now in 2017, but at the time printing an image in your own home felt revolutionary.” Smith says that he came up with lots of potential ways to turn dot matrix prints into moving images right away. “Since the paper used with these printers came on ‘ribbon feed,’ that is, one long tearable stretch of paper with removable sides, I automatically likened it to a strip film.”
