Adam Bizanski sets a shot for his video of The Shins’ song ‘Pink Bullets’.You might not think that Israeli soldiers have a lot of time on their hands, but hours are spent in towers, guarding bases and time is often passed listening to music. One soldier, Adam Bizanski, chosen soundtrack of his army service was , Inverted World, the first album by the popular indie band, The Shins.
The album not only inspired Bizanski to make a video for the band, but the band actually embraced it and placed it on their website. Due to the positive reactions The Shins received from their fans, their label, Sub Pop, submitted the video to MTV and the video is currently on heavy rotation on MTV’s college station, mtvU.
Bizanski, a 22-year-old fresh out of the army made the video for ‘Pink Bullets’ from their sophomore album, Chutes Too Narrow, using the painstakingly slow art of handcrafted stop-motion animation in his Tel Aviv apartment.
“Much like everyone in Israel, I served three years in the army, and during that period I got acquainted with Oh, Inverted World,” Bizanski told MTV News. “A friend of mine was going to New York to catch a Shins show at a record shop. I gave him a letter to give to the band and a video I’ve created for an Israeli artist (Yehuda Bloch).
“Eight months later, the same week I was getting discharged from the army, I received an e-mail from James (Mercer, lead singer of The Shins) saying that he liked the video I sent and would like me to create a video for the Shins.”
A year had passed, and the front man of the band had forgotten about the initial correspondence.
“He had e-mailed me about a year ago and asked me if he could work on a video for us. I had kind of forgotten about it, honestly. I don’t even remember how he got my e-mail address, Here’s this guy from Israel – in the Israeli army, actually – and he made this cool, paper-motion video for us,” Mercer told MTV News.
The video features, oddly enough, a somber cow singing the song in a backdrop of a farm, other cows and birds – all made using the art of origami.
“I have some cow fixation, it’s hard to deny that,” Bizanski said. “But when I first heard the song, portraying such a delicate love story, painting such a rural image, I immediately knew the main character must have four legs. I really had no choice,” Bizanski told MTV.