The whole video is a true "one-take". All of the 3D assets were arranged in a single giant world, like a videogame level, and the virtual camera was animated to fly through at the pace of the song. It was rendered out in one single pass, with no additional VFX.
The 3D scans are called "point clouds", and were captured both with an iPhone 11 and with a $30,000 Leica LiDAR scanner they borrowed from a friend who is a VFX artist.
The idea for "Clove Cigarette" came out of COVID-19 restrictions. In Colin and Jared's first meeting about the video, they were sitting in Jared's backyard and thinking, "Okay, what can we do safely?"
Jared: "We said, 'How do we make a video that's just this - me, and you, and this backyard? And maybe a camera, and maybe Andy, and keep it that simple and still have it be an interesting video?' Our friend Luca had been showing me some interesting point cloud tests he'd been doing, and I thought if we could do scans, maybe that was a way to make something very simple but very beautiful. We could keep the number of locations as minimal as the number of locations in the song, which were essentially a bar and a moment between two people on a summer evening."
Jared: "We said, 'How do we make a video that's just this - me, and you, and this backyard? And maybe a camera, and maybe Andy, and keep it that simple and still have it be an interesting video?' Our friend Luca had been showing me some interesting point cloud tests he'd been doing, and I thought if we could do scans, maybe that was a way to make something very simple but very beautiful. We could keep the number of locations as minimal as the number of locations in the song, which were essentially a bar and a moment between two people on a summer evening."
Inside the Skyline Restaurant, the waiter at the bar is actually director Jared Raab. Co-director Colin Medley and animator Luca Tarantini are also visible as 3D-scanned patrons in the restaurant.
The taxi that appears outside the Skyline Restaurant was actually "borrowed" from a YouTube video that Director Jared Raab found. The video is of someone walking all the way around a New York yellow taxi, filming it with their phone. This was enough visual information to reconstruct the taxi as a 3D point cloud, and that's what appears in the video. Toronto doesn't have any yellow taxi cabs.