Bjork All is Full of Love

Overview: Bjork’s video, “All is Full of Love” was the first DVD single ever released. Looking at it, its not difficult to see why. This thing is beautiful, innovative, wonderfully shot. All is Full of Love raked in the awards back in 2000, including the MTV Best Special Effects award, the ITS Monitor award, and the Best Music Video at the 1999 London Effects and Animation (LEAF) awards. As I really don’t have a video category yet, I’m including this in my film short category.

The Video: All is Full of Love opens with a female looking robot is being put together, while she is musing (singing). Eventually another twin robot enters the picture, and the two robots begin to embrace to the chorus, “All is full of love.” Throughout the entire video, the builder machines continue to make adjustments to the pair. The pacing is slow and deliberate, which mirrors the song.

The Visuals: All is Full of Love provides incredibly realistic and high production values. The result is an incredibly immersive posthuman experience. Almost immediately the viewer is drawn into the setting and does not leave until the video ends. The colors are almost all whites and blacks, with minor hues of purple interacting.

The Robots: The absolutely wonderful Robots in this video were built by Paul Catling. These robots have been pretty influential, and most certainly influenced the robots in the large scale cyberpunk movie, I, Robot. Also, I’d hazard a guess that this video also most likely influenced artist Nicolas Leblanc, who did the robots in the Cyberpunkreview header.

The FX: Chris Cunningham used Glassworks for all the FX in this video. Glassworks does a wonderful job of blending the actual robot with Bjork’s face. But really, it appears the process was even more complex than that, as Chris Cunningham relates in an interview with American Cinematographer:

“Every single shot in the video has about four layers. The first element is the shot of the set and the robot prop doing nothing, which we’d film for about 21 seconds. We’d then remove the prop Björk robot and put (the real) Björk in with her face painted white and wearing a blue suit. Using a mix of the (master shot and a live feed of Björk in frame) on the video monitor, we’d then try to match up as much as possible. It was a pretty crude and fairly terrifying method of shooting the video. For the Avid editing, I basically had a series of stills of a robot on a set and some crude shots of Björk wearing a blue suit with her face painted white. There was a definite feeling of insecurity all the way until the first couple of shots were finished in post, when I could finally tell whether it was working or not.” (American Cinematographer)

The Bottom Line: Truly, Bjork’s All is Full Of Love is an absolutely terrific cyberpunk music video. I can’t say enough how much I think of this. Give it a watch.