Marvey King “Perfect Lullaby”

2004-marvey-king-perfect-lullaby“Perfect Lullaby” was the second and final funded video for a Marvey King song, after “Rosary” from 2000. The video was shot in Sydney and made by the Australian director and animator Simon Rippingdale.

The video is shot as a serious of still images, all animated together. So there’s a jerkiness to the video, but it also means being able to include cool timelapse effects that a video camera wouldn’t be able to capture.

There’s a bit of fun had with the stop-motion. At one point Marvey is sitting on a chair, she gets up, takes a few steps and the chair is suddenly ablaze. She’s also shot standing in the middle of a metro station concourse while a blur of commuters rushes either side of her.

But the video spends most of its time in a windowless room, which contains some fancy furniture, a rocking horse and two cabaret girls. While Marvey is in this room, most of the time her hair is crawling all over her face, which makes me wants to comb her hair back in a ponytail until it can learn to keep still.

Because of the stop-motion production, there’s no lip synching, so Marvey feels a bit distant. This is compounded by the video being set in Sydney. It’s like instead of Marvey being the singer, the song is being sung about her.

Best bit: the clock on the wall in the windowless room – time passes!

Director: Simon Rippingale
Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision

Next… underground, overacting.

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