Glass Of The Microscope
Glass of the Microscope is a music video for New York psychedelic-pop band Yeasayer, shot inside the science laboratories of Naturalis and Leiden University where the band becomes a team of post-apocalyptic bioscientists searching for a cure for the world.
“... filmed in one of the oldest research universities in Europe and the place where the 17th-century Dutch microbiologist Antoine van Leeuwenhoek developed an early prototype of the microscope.”
inside the body of the world
The video was filmed in a molecular lab at Leiden University, one of the oldest research universities in Europe; the same institution where 17th-century Dutch microbiologist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek first looked through a lens and saw what the naked eye had never seen. That history is not decorative. The film lives inside the same impulse: the desire to look closer, to go further in, to find something at the limit of the visible.
Van Leer filmed crystallisations directly under the microscope, capturing the strange geometries that form in organic matter at the threshold of perception. Into this footage he superimposed an underwater duet by dancers Reve Terborg and Lucien Denny. Their bodies moving through fluid as if traveling inside the very substance the scientists are trying to understand. The microscopic and the choreographic become the same image: the cure the world needs, glimpsed from the inside.
Alongside this organic imagery, band members Chris Keating, Ira Wolf Tuton, and Anand Wilder were captured using volumetric scanning: a digital technique that dissolves the body into data points, echoing the language of electron microscopy. Organic and digital, fluid and fixed, the living and the measured: the video holds these in tension, the way the song does.
“After technology saves the world — as Silicon Valley wants us to believe — what then? Well, then it looks as though the future of humanity depends on four dudes from Brooklyn.”
credits
| Direction | |
| Direction | Ruben van Leer |
| Performance | |
| Scientists | Chris Keating, Anand Wilder, Ira Wolf Tuton (Yeasayer) |
| Scientist | Fred Hess |
| Dancers | Lucien Denny, Reve Terborg |
| Camera | |
| Director of Photography | Diderik Evers |
| Camera Assistant | Alexander McKenzie |
| Gaffer | Maarten Van Der Pluijm, Blaine Bradley |
| Grip | Peter Van Vugt |
| Diving Team | Kevin Lebis, Branko van Kooten, Lauren Lavoo |
| Projections | Edwin Haverkamp, Kay van der Vree |
| Microscopy | Fred Hess, Ruben van Leer |
| Post-Production | |
| Editing | Rigel Kilston |
| VFX | Justin Blyth |
| Compositing | Jurrien Steenkamp, Ruben Van Leer |
| Art & Styling | |
| Styling | Bonne Reijn |
| Set Art | Ine Van Den Elsen, Sanne Van Wersch |
| Set Dress | Anne Mevissen, Anne Wagemaker |
| Make-up | Kim Verhagen |
| Hair | Ellen Oosterlaar |
| Make-up Assistant | Merle Holterman Mua |
| Production | |
| Production | Ruben van Leer, Jamie Timms |
| Production Assistants | Anouk Valkenburg, Jurrien Steenkamp |
| Set Assistant | Bart Le Belle |
| Casting | Patricia Hofstede, Nadia Moussaid |
| BTS Photography | Laura Andalou |
| Extras | Patricia Hofstede, Eva Bartels, Dim Balsem, Gerben Blauw, Petra Blauw, Kassandra Schreuder, Eli Schreuder, Heer en mevrouw Sterk, Roxanne Dekker |
| Powered by | TAX Fonds, Camera Rentals, Het Licht, LUMC Leiden, Naturalis, Master Film, Hectic Electric |
| Special Thanks | |
| Thanks to | Jason Foster, Ceci Gomez, Paul Drake, Prof. Hans Tanke, Annelies van der Laan, Roman Koning, Prof. Rob Zwijnenberg, Martin Werkman, Laura Andalou, Pieter van de Waterbeemd, Kris Dekkers, Govert Janse, Rachel Stone |
filmmaker & media-artist
