Erasure • Features • Behind The Scenes
'Don't Say You Love Me' Video
"Our treatment sees Andy Bell as a tin toy astronaut going about his everyday space age life. He is accompanied by a faithful robot (a kind of "vince-clarke-o-tron", operating various control modules in the background), and an idiotic space dog.
We see him engaging in his everyday chores - flying rocket ships, patrolling the moon, testing space dust samples in his science lab, drinking cups of tea, reading the paper, cooking dinner, mopping the space station floor, etc.
Although he has his robot companions, it is clear that he is emotionally isolated and alone.
Occasionally we see the earth that he's left behind spinning in the background. The atmosphere would be often comic, but overall quite wistful and sad.
Whether animated with real tin robots. Or with 3D models, the appearance would be as if it were real, shot on 60's Technicolor film.
All aspects within it would have the appearance of real toys that might be found in a child's bedroom - the earth is a spinning metal geography globe, the moon has a moulded plastic surface, lab experiments are performed with a Salter's chemistry set.
The constant backdrop would be a childlike twinkling starry sky.
We would shoot Andy singing the track, and map it onto a 'printed' sticker in the astronaut's helmet. This will animate in a stop-frame manner, retaining a two dimensional feel and part of the tin toy itself, rather than a real 'video' head inside a tin helmet."
Brothers Tom & Mark took their inspiration for the video from the tin astronauts they used to play with together as children. The plot soon escalated into an excessive childhood toy space fantasy complete with rocket ships, moon walkers and robotic dogs.
Commenting on how the video came about, Tom Perrett says, "It started as a cheeky way of integrating a live-action performance by Andy into an animation, based on those old 60's toy astronauts with bizarre 'illustrated' faces. We'd shoot Andy's face and then map it onto a kind of animated printed sticker inside his helmet."
Mark adds, "The song seemed to suggest a certain emotional distancing, so we cast Andy as a spaceman living a lonely, humdrum, old-fashioned futuristic life, orbiting the moon. Vince provided a bonus sub-plot as a frustrated mission commander and soon we had a complete Erasure space mission going on!"
Rather than being an action-packed animation, the video is more emotive and hinges on the atmosphere of the track coming through and adding to the storyline. The design and feel of the shots were fundamental to getting the feeling of the video just right.
Tom & Mark spent a great deal of time working on the designs and models for the toys and interiors in order to balance the more melancholic side of the story with some subtle, and much more stupid, comedy moments.
Tom & Mark Perrett interview reproduced from POP-C.