Nicos Livesy, a freelance animator and member of the London-based heavy metal band Throne, had a great idea for a music video: a stop-motion animated sci-fi short, rendered entirely in machine-embroidered denim rectangles. Seven months, a successful Kickstarter campaign and about 45 million stitches later, that dream became a reality.

The video for the single, “Tharsis Sleeps,” depicts the band as a trio of astronauts who must drop an atomic bomb into a volcano on Mars in order to raise the planet’s temperature to make it habitable for human life. Livesy says he got the idea for the video from the embroidered patches heavy metal fans sew on their clothes to support their favorite bands.

Creating the video was a painstaking process. “The animation was all drawn into the computer frame by frame using a tablet,” Livesy told Dezeen, an online architecture and design magazine. The video’s 3,000 frames were then digitized using software provided by Wilcom, sewn with three 10-needle machines lent by Brother using thread donated by Madeira. Each frame was shot under a rostrum camera and imported back into the computer for video editing, he explains.

The very cool completed music video is available for viewing online at vimeo.com/97718226.