Video of the Day: Half-Life: Alyx’s G-Man Sings Talking Heads’ ‘Once in a Lifetime’

Animator Corey Laddo is in love with the mysterious paranormally gifted G-Man from Half-Life: Alyx. Laddo has been making short comedic videos featuring the character for the past few months, cranking them out at a prodigious rate. The videos range from the slapstick to the downright creepy, but they all have one thing in common: they make you laugh.

Enter Laddo’s latest and greatest work yet – a shot-for-shot perfect reaction of Talking Heads’  1980 music video for Once in a Lifetime. The attention to detail is remarkable, even matching David Byrne’s facial expressions. This is some serious top-level skill being shown off here. He’s been teasing work from it for months, and the project is finally done.

Have a look.

The animation, like the rest of Laddo’s short pieces, was made in Half-Life: Alyx‘s Source 2, using the new Source Filmmaker, and it plays to the game engine’s strengths. Not everything an animator does in Source 2 translates to a smooth, believable motion, but this is fine in this case. David Byrne’s strange, puppet-on-a-string choreography is a perfect match for what Source 2 tends to want to do anyway.

For reference, here’s the original, 1980 Talking Heads music video straight from David Byrne’s YouTube account. The full genius of Laddo’s animation only becomes apparent when you compare the two.

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Gene Turnbow

President of Krypton Media Group, Inc., radio personality and station manager of SCIFI.radio. Part writer, part animator, part musician, part illustrator, part programmer, part entrepreneur – all geek.