Husband-and-wife directing duo Guillermo Lecuona and Tera Hollingsworth - aka My Happy People - are noted for their commercials and motion design, most notably for the title sequence of 24. But their latest project, Ants In Black Turtlenecks, is a video for Hollingsworth's own music under the name Slyrbe. It's more like an experimental short than a traditional promo, a striking example of the directors' passion for blending strong design elements and surreal narratives. The film uses a combination of live action and stop-motion animation to illustrate the mystical behaviour of an unusual group of young women, a child, and a baby doll.

A little girl in red emerges from her house in the woods at night, rolls a ball into the bush and out emerge four women in 19th century dress with porcelain-like faces. They dance in a circle, lay hands to the ground and produce a little baby doll. We follow the doll's abandonment, before it all ends with the baby doll waking from her dream and snuggling up to the girl in bed.

According to the directors, the song's lyrics are about people who put others down in order to prop themselves up, and they wanted the video to represent this theme - the baby represents everyone, naked against the elements; the dancing women are "dolls of nature" that give birth to us then leave us to fend for ourselves; the little girl symbolizes innocence, and so on. Lecuona and Hollingsworth have created a spooky world, highly appropriate for Slyrbe's gothic folk, where the doll-like women have the movement of robots, while the little doll becomes progressively more human.

"We decided to move the humans like dolls to level their range of movement," explain the directors. "We shot them frame-by-frame as if they were full-size, stop-motion puppets, while intentionally keeping the doll's movement to a minimum to add drama to the last shot, where it wakes up and looks around."

Lecuona and Hollingsworth came up with a flash-based stop-motion approach using a digital SLR involving a five second exposure, where they vibrated the camera to blur the parts of the set lit by hot lights. Before the shutter closed, they fired an off-camera flash unit aimed at the main subject to keep them sharp and separated them from the background. The directors then exported high-resolution 2K stills and brought them in After Effects to stabilize the sequences.

The most difficult aspect was that they had just one night to shoot everything. "The thing that saved us was that we only had to shoot six frames per finished second. That was still a lot to ask from our five-year-old star Sophia. She had to stay still in between the photos so continuity and the animation would work. Can you imagine being five and having to freeze so much?"

Hollingsworth did not come away from the shoot unscathed, however. "The most enduring challenge was when a poisonous spider crawled out of one of the antique boots and bit me on the leg," she reveals. "I received stitches after they cut a small chunk of my leg. All the technical difficulties don't hold a candle to that."