The “Go to Sleep” video puts a motion-captured Thom Yorke on a bench

The video for “Go to Sleep” has a computer-made Thom Yorke sitting on a park bench in a regency-style town square, singing while office workers stream past without seeing him. Thom was scanned for it, with about 70 markers on his face alone, and on 28 July he confirmed on the band's message board that the figure is him.

I had to wear the stupidest bobbly node suit. There were no cameras just infrared scanning light things. It was very strange.

Thom Yorke³

But oh yes thats me. I was mapped into it. From the movement data and hi res scans. Much like TRON.

Thom Yorke³

The film went online on 24 July as a QuickTime file, ahead of the single's UK release on 18 August. Alex Rutterford directed it for Black Dog Films, and The Mill, the London effects house, made almost all of it on computers. About 20 of its artists worked for roughly eight weeks from Rutterford's own rough animatic. Thom's head was scanned in several poses, then his body and his face were motion-captured, and the result was checked against real video of him and the band. On screen he moves like himself but is drawn in faceted, low-polygon shapes.

As the song builds, the buildings round the square collapse and the rubble re-forms as flat-roofed concrete blocks, and the crowds walk on regardless. The Mill made those crowds with Massive, the software written for the battle scenes in The Lord of the Rings, which it says has never before been used on a commercial job; each walker senses the kerbs and steers round the others. The buildings have no surface texture, but they fall like real ones, modelled on footage of real demolitions with filmed smoke and dust laid over them.

Nearly the whole film is black and white, and its only colour is a red flower, which opens it and closes it.