Now that Austin ranks as one of the fastest growing cities in the U.S., it might be tempting to chalk ATX’s popularity up to present social fads and our booming job market. Those factors surely contribute, but here at Austin.com, we’re also strongly convinced that people are moving to Austin because they’re homesick.
Maybe it’s because we’ve built a community that rewards bold, beautiful creativity and strives to respect and connect with people from different walks of life. Maybe it’s our obsession with good music and great Tex-Mex, or our stubbornness to preserve our green spaces as developers descend.
Whatever the reason, long-time residents aren’t leaving (or if they do, it’s never for very long) and folks who relocate here from other cities — even great ones — are finding in Austin the home they never had.
Created by YouTube user Arthur Kendrick, this short stop motion video embodies all of the weepy feels experienced by those who finally make it home to Austin:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f64P_NnHjIg?rel=0&controls=0&showinfo=0]
Radical Face‘s leader Ben Cooper actually gave Kendrick explicit permission to use his poignant song “Welcome Home” in the film. Did Cooper fall in love with ATX during SXSW 2010? We certainly wouldn’t blame him.
After spending three weeks filming his brother-in-law exploring some of Austin’s most iconic destinations, Kendrick employed two distinct animation techniques to create the video — stop motion and rotoscoping.
Stop motion is the process of combining a series of photographs in which the subject is moved in small increments between each frame to create the illusion of movement, much like a flip book. In rotoscoping, animators draw objects over live video footage, to give films more of a cartoon or comic book vibe.
“This video is what I felt like when I moved to Austin,” Kendrick told Buzzfeed. “Home at last.”
We get that — and apparently, we aren’t the only ones.
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Featured photo: YouTube user Arthur Kendrick.
