Shynola's Jason Groves draws a chalk animation on the set of Coldplay's "Strawberry Swing" music video.

British directing trio Shynola released a statement this week to refute allegations that they ripped off the idea for their recent Coldplay music video from an indie video released last year.

The controversy began earlier this week when London-based singer-songwriter Andy J. Gallagher noted in an interview and in a blog post on his website that there are "striking similarities" between his music video "Something Else", directed by Owen Trevor, and Coldplay's Shynola-directed "Strawberry Swing".

Both music videos feature people interacting with stop-motion chalk animations. In "Something Else", Gallagher plays chalk instruments drawn on a chalkboard and kicks and dodges objects animated on a brick wall. "Strawberry Swing" is more epic in narrative scope. It stars Coldplay front man Chris Martin as a superhero who travels between planets to rescue a damsel from an evil squirrel.

When Gallagher emailed his gripe to Coldplay's management, they deferred to the directors: "I'm afraid the creative on the video was written by Shynola, not Coldplay."

Enter Shynola. On Wednesday, the directors, Kenny Kentworthy, Chris Harding and Jason Groves, released a lengthy statement via their London-based production company Black Dog Films denying the charges and outlining a myriad of influences from their original treatment, including old Superman comics, Felix the Cat and The Simpsons.

"Having never seen Mr. Trevor's video before, we can categorically deny that his video was any influence on our video. Any similarities are purely coincidental," they wrote.

"The technique of 'top down' films and animations in chalk has been done countless times before. We ourselves were inspired by a section of Peter Gabriel's 'Sledgehammer' video."

Gallagher's comments came less than a week after Coldplay settled a plagiarism lawsuit with guitarist Joe Satriani, prompting media outlets and blogs to claim the band had stumbled into yet another creative dispute. Earlier this year, music legend Yusuf Islam accused the band of borrowing one of his melodies for their song "Viva La Vida".

In the interview that started the controversy, Gallagher admitted it was unlikely Coldplay copied his video, but took umbrage with the band's pronouncements that "Strawberry Swing" was "groundbreaking".

"While I can't say they copied me, there are an awful lot of similarities between my video and theirs," he told the website CMU Music. "I think it's unfair that 'Strawberry Swing' will probably be nominated for numerous awards and is being universally-acclaimed as groundbreaking, when Mr. Trevor had virtually the same idea at least a year before."

Shynola responded to this charge by noting that thanks to YouTube, it's easy to source stylistically similar animated works. To illustrate the point, they link to a clip entitled "awesome chalk animation" predating Gallagher's video that is strikingly similar.

"It may have been unsupportable hyperbole from Coldplay to claim that our video was groundbreaking. But it is NOT plagiarism," they wrote. "And Mr. Trevor's video is NOT groundbreaking either."

"Creativity involves the constant absorption and spitting-out of influences," they continued. "However, we never copy."

Read Shynola's full statement here.

Read about the making of "Stawberry Swing" and check out storyboards in our Behind-the-Scenes blog.

www.shynola.com