Incubus responds to Gerrit van Dijk about the Drive case
Gerrit van Dijk has previously brought to attention that the 2001 Incubus semi-animated video for their single Drive is directly based (without any explcit acknowledgment or permission) on his Berlin-awarded film I Move, So I Am (1998).
van Dijk has made himself a comparison video, in which he highlights the similarities between the two films.
Gerrit van Dijk was suspended from his Twitter account, trying unsuccessfully to elicit an answer from the Incubus group. The manager of Incubus, Steve Rennie, now responds to the accusations. He leaves insinuations concerning the ulterior motives of the director about a video made 12 years ago (but is there a deadline for holding a case for unauthorized use?)
Rennie claims that no one in the group was familiar with van Dijk and his work (including I Move, So I Am). He relegates responsibility to Sony Music and the video director it hired, "who wrote the treatment and directed the video". He agrees that Brandon Boyd and Jose Pasillas "drew the pictures used in certain sequences in the video", but denies they were influenced by I Move, So I Am. He states, "the idea of using animated 'drawings' as the basis for a video was hardly new when Incubus made the 'Drive' video".
The latter statement is irrelevant, though. Gerrit van Dikj did not accuse Incubus for using animated drawings in general in their music videos. He only pinpointed the specific similarities between the two films in terms of movement sequences. So, leaving potential influences aside, one has no other option but to attribute the similarities between the two films to a case of a happy coincidence.
