Ivana Bobic directs a smart and stylish video for The Kooks' Forgive & Forget, with a stylised band performance video 'in the round', eventually surrounded by dancers who are, for all intents and purposes, identical - or at least the clones of the the perfect lead girl.

Then Ivana moves her strong graphic set-up onto another level, making the girls the components of a strobe-soaked real-time human zoetrope, courtesy of some in-camera trickery.

IVANA BOBIC:

"Forgive & Forget is such a fun, big track that I wanted to have an all-singing-all-dancing approach to it - the whole lot - band, dancers and a giant human zoetrope. 

"The title suggested a kind of tongue-in-cheek love amnesia and constant repetition, so I wondered if I could make the whole video circular - constantly spinning around and around. I wanted the dancers to multiply into the band performance as the track progresses, they’re like space-babes with an Alexander Wang twist, appearing from the dark. The dance builds and builds to the big middle eight drums where the whole spinning circus accelerates to a giant zoetrope and the dancers turn into one. It's a bit of a visual pun on the 'forgetting'.  

"The execution was really technical but I wanted the final thing to feel really effortless and seamless. No one had ever done this kind of life-sized, real time zoetrope before so we had to build a special rig. I worked with DoP Jake Scott and Panavision to create the effect and it was great to experiment with all the possible ways we could achieve it.

"It works on the basic principles of the original Victorian zoetrope; the shutter selects the frame visible to the eye, eliminating the blur and creating the illusion ofmovement. What you see here is a strobe light acting as a shutter, capturing frames of each girls dancing in real time. It was mind-melting at times but completely worthwhile. 

"For the look we wanted to do something really slick and paired back - big graphic shapes and a huge soft light that wrapped around everything. The girls were styled by my long-time collaborator, the awesome Sam Ranger. Tui Lin dressed the band exclusively in Saint Laurent - an amazing, understatedly cool look for them. 

"The Kooks were so much fun to shoot - tons of energy and lots of laughs and we wanted that to really translate to the final film, so we kept in a good balance of sultry cool moves and real band fun."