There have been several video competitions this year, with bands asking fans and aspirant directors to make their videos. Modest Mouse staged such a contest for Missed The Boat, which has generated this effort, which began charming YouTube viewers even before the winner was announced.

A geeky scientist invents a robot (Walter), who's given a heart and taught some basic human skills, to be both his companion and household slave. He endearingly carries out his duties, but treated terribly by his unkind inventor, the robot ventures out into the world on his own to find his true love, an ingénue he has seen on TV. He finds his beauty in a being attacked by a monster, which the robot zaps – and the pair walk off together hand in hand.

The video, attributed to Walter Robot, is actually the work of multimedia artist Bill Barminski – who appears as the scientist – and writer/co-director Christopher Louie.

“We were in the middle of exhausting ourselves on another video for an artist named Milosh when we found out about the contest,” says Louie. “We figured with extra footage from the Milosh video, the green screen footage Modest Mouse posted and the incredibly talented Walter [the robot], we could easily piece together a nice little video,” adds Barminski.

But the project became bigger than they intended. “All that stuff snuck into the script and we ended up using ten seconds of the band,” says Louie. “We spent a lot of time designing the scientist's garage/lab to give him a back story. If you watch closely, you see inside his heart box there are plans for his previous robot companion – that tells why he treats the robot so coldly.”

For the hologram, the duo dressed an actress in Fifties clothes, shot her on green screen, keyed out the green and then downgraded the footage. They then took that footage and embedded it into their shots with rotos or cutting mattes.

All in all, for a project made entirely out-of-pocket, pulling favours and by the directors doing all the post production themselves, it's an extraordinary result.