Oakland psychedelic fuzzers Waterstrider blur the line between stillness and movement in their new video for “Frayed.” The clip plays out like one of those flip-books from your childhood, a collection of 40,000 photographs sequenced to look like a video. It features the Waterstrider vocalist Nate Salman and Kevn Tijerina. The seams between shots are visible and give the clip a stilted, puppeteered feel that contrasts nicely with the song’s funk-pop longing and elation. Watch it below.

Director Marta Dymek wrote at length about her concept for the video:

From the moment I first heard “Frayed” I could tell that it was telling a story of trying to get something one can’t have. Being in the presence of something unattainable. It reminded me of those dreams where something amazing almost happens with someone, but then the mind interrupts it and puts all these obstacles in the way. My dreams rarely have any satisfying ending to them. Using only photographs in the form of stop motion and not your regular video, I wanted to show that broken dreamlike feeling of longing — illustrated beautifully through the choreography by Zander Brown. I teamed up with an amazing photographer Anastasiia Sapon, knowing that she could fully convey that emotion through her photography. We shot for two days, shooting only photos and no video. After we were done with shooting, I had close to 40,000 pictures to look through. It was a doozy. Normally, I edit the video and I do color grading at the very end, but for this project I did the color grading first in Lightroom taking advantage of the fact that it’s photos. It took me two days to export all the images in the right dimension and with all the color grading applied to them. From there, I made little nested sequences of each scene and started the editing process from there. It was much more time consuming than just shooting regular video, but it definitely paid off in the end.

“Frayed” is part of the compilation album OIM: Vol I out 6/23. The album highlights Bay Area bands on the label OIM.