LeAnn Rimes Records New Music Video Entirely On iPhones

LeAnn Rimes records her new music video, “Gasoline and Matches”, entirely on iPhones.

The single is a collaboration between the multi-award winning country star, pop artist Rob Thomas, and Jeff Beck with music co-written by Buddy Miller.

Clash Of The Titans director Ray Harryhausen, who passed away earlier this year, served as inspiration to create the original piece made up of 8,000 stills carefully edited to move in harmony.

Using the popular app, Vine, LeAnn Rimes’ video started taking life, when animator Ian Padgham was charged with the time consuming task of making the video look as if it was filmed in sequence.

The fact that LeAnn Rimes recorded the five-minute video using two iPhones, made the cost almost nil, just as anything any normal person records on their phone.

Using stop-motion, which is taking stills and then stringing them together to make it look like there is motion, Padgham created the original work.

“When we saw Ian’s stop motion work on Vine, the first thing I noticed was this crazy sick sense of humor wrapped around a lot of heart and warmth,” Rimes said of the director.

The animator, famous for his work on Vine, tells The Hollywood Reporter, patience was what was most needed while piecing all the parts together, after LeAnn Rimes’ producer Darrell Brown became obsessed with the Vine app.

The country starlet says:

“Darrell turned me onto Ian’s Vine account, and I’d never seen anything like itI was shocked that nobody had done a (music) video like that before, and I jumped at the chance to do it. My part in it took 20 or 30 minutes at the most. Ian flew to Dublin, where I was on tour, and put two iPhones up and filmed me doing two passes of the song, along with a few odd things like ‘Reach for a star’ or ‘Pretend you’re falling.'”

Part of the process also including doing a mini-shoot with LeAnn Rimes and Matchbox Twenty’s Rob Thomas, in New York, after which Padgham incorporated the stills and two protagonists to put the video together…in his San Francisco living room.

“You still get Rob and me” performing, LeAnn Rimes commented, “but I love how he entwined us with the (animated) characters.”

Really dig the artistry in this #stopmotion music video by @leannrimes and @ThisIsRobThomas. http://t.co/hQb4MSu4Pw

— Robert Loughry (@RobertSLoughry) December 9, 2013

“Gasoline and Matches” is from LeAnn Rimes album Spitfire which she says is a departure from her usual stuff:

“I had never in my life made a record like this … where basically the whole album was just a creative passion project. If the single clicks somehow with radio, it would be great, but if not, it was totally fun to have a great piece of work in this video we dreamt up and continue to work with really cool people.”

Darrell Brown recalls how impressed he was with Padgham’s work on Vine and how he reached out to him:

“I think we recognized the passion in Ian and thought he was from the same tribe as us. So I reached out to him. And he didn’t answer in the beginning, because I think he thought we were Twitter trolls.”

He had to be convinced that in fact it was not a friend’s prank and LeAnn Rimes actually wanted to work with him so Brown sent him a video query.