Promo ·· 05.1999 ·· 'björk: all is full of love' Created in virtually equal measure by superb production design and seamless post-production work, ultimately it represents the fully realised fruition of one of Cunningham's favourite visual ideas, the roots of which appear in his very first music video. The focus of that video, made for Warp artist Autechre, was a white plastic robot insect, built by Cunningham himself (while he was working with Stanley Kubrick on an unrealised sci-fi movie project) and shot against white. In All Is Full Of Love, the robot coming to life in a sterile futuristic white room is Björk herself. "It definitely stems by my obsession with white plastic." says Cunningham. The inspiration, apart from Star Wars stormtroopers, comes from a youthful obsession with Japanese motorbikes. The lines of the bikes were very feminine and he says, "I wanted to make this video as feminine as possible, which was tricky considering everything in it is a boy's dream." In one way the video is simple: the robot Björk is sparked and prodded into life by robot worker arms. Then she encounters her own robot alter-ego. And for the rest of the video, the two female robots are joined in a passionate and very sexy embrace. After first viewing, the feeling is of wanting to see more. However, like the rest of Cunningham's work, there is a subtlety of craft which goes deeper than the initial visual/visceral reaction. "My initial idea was to have a final stage where the two robots unfold like a flower as they mate,." says Cunningham. "We couldn't manage it, but perhaps it's just as well, as the music doesn't really allow for it." The robots were built by Paul Catling, who also sculpted the masks for Windowlicker. Catling, who taught Cunningham about model-making, sculpted the full-sized robots in clay in two hours. Cunningham worked with Julian Caldow on the set design, and it was put together by Chris Oddy. But the director says, "To be perfectly honest I didn't have time to make the set look exactly as I wanted it, so I made it post heavy." For example, on the shoot there were two main robot arms (operated simply by rods), but in post production, a third and fourth robot arm were created in CGI at Glassworks. "I think I lost confidence that there was enough happening," admits Cunningham, and this put pressure on an already six-figure budget. But the results are amazing: it's impossible to tell what is "real" and what is not. This also applies to the work on the Björk robot. First of all the robot was shot in situ without its head, then Björk was put in the same position to match her head with the robot body. But only her eyes and mouth were actually used - the rest of the robot head is 3D, tracked from her real one. "It was a disturbing edit in many ways, because we started with a series of stills and some very dodgy shots," says Cunningham. Including, of course, Björk snogging her robot self. The director says the sex was Björk's idea: she strongly identified the song with some Chinese karma sutra figures which she gave Cunningham. "To me their main characteristic was the penetration," he says. "So it left me with a problem of how to make a video that would get shown." Ultimately, shots were cut because they were too over the top. "The track is so beautiful, I didn't want to debase it," he says, "so it became apparent that the less you saw the better it was." It's possible the video may still upset some people, perhaps because there is still the human element of Björk, who like Cunningham continues to push the boundaries of what is possible in music videos. The effectiveness of the amazing visual effects owes almost as much to her restrained acting as to the director.