Radiohead adopt fan Clement Picon's animation as the “Reckoner” video

Thom Yorke has posted Clement Picon's animated film for “Reckoner” on Dead Air Space, the band's blog, as the song's official video. It fitted the song so well that the band asked Picon whether they could use it, and he said yes. Yorke, writing from Tokyo, calls it one of my favourite video things that has ever happened³, and then signs off to go and fold some clothes.

Picon, who is French, made the film for the In Rainbows animation contest that Aniboom and TBD Records, the band's American label, opened in March, with Adult Swim and MySpace attached. Entrants could pick any song on the album; Picon's entry was called “Reckoner V2”. The contest was meant to end with one winner, who would get $10,000 to make a full-length video. In August the band named four: Picon, Kota Totori from Japan for “15 Step”, Wolfgang Jaiser and Claus Winter from Germany for “Videotape”, and Tobias Stretch from the US for “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi”. Radiohead put up the extra $30,000 themselves so that each of them could make a full film.

There is no “Reckoner” single in the shops, but sales of the song's remix parts, on iTunes since 23 September, took it into the UK chart at number 74 at the end of the month.

The contest