How did the Björk
video come to you
and what is the basic concept of the video?
Björk had seen our last music video (Grizzly Bear) and gave us
a call.
The concept of the video is our attempt at creating mytho-poetic
cosmology of a primitive world complete with water deities and the
struggle towards the future. The main theme being nomadism since it is
for the track ‘Wanderlust.’
There are a number of different elements shot, or created in post, that
all have to be combined, There is a large-scale, pre-human Yak-puppet,
about 7-feet long and 7-feet tall, then there is Björk, then
there is a
version of Björk that she wears on her backpack played by a
professional dancer, a large river god/transcendental beast, the
landscapes shot in miniature and the CG river. So each of those
elements were manifested in a completely different environment and shot
differently.
Encyclopedia Pictura -
interview "Making
a 3D Music Video for Björk" at StudioDaily, 28
november 2007
Directing
team Sean Hellfritsch and Isaiah
Saxon
intended to do big things for Björk with a decidedly small
music video
budget. But they have the right attitude for making things happen
— do
a lot of it yourself and depend on your friends. First, their camera of
choice was 2K — 2048x1152 at 24fps — but it was not
a budget-breaker,
it was Silicon Imaging’s new SI-2K Mini. Along with the Mini,
they got
a CineForm RAW encoding license. Joel Edelstein joined the two Minis to
shoot stereo.
Shooting greenscreen locally in
Long Island City (Hellfritsch and Saxon lived in NYC during their
months of work on the video) the two cobbled together two interesting
solutions. On set they used a custom-built beam-splitter rigged up with
a mirror to line up the two SI-2K Minis for proper stereo. They had to
shoot their giant yak
(a fanciful, very large, yak-like beast with two performers inside
giving it movement and expression) from many angles so that later
UVPhactory could composite it repeatedly to create a yak herd in which
the yaks are seen in different positions from different angles. They
also had to capture Björk’s performance in stereo:
she “rides” a yak
(actually two furry humps resembling the yak’s); she deals
with the
river water as if it’s a character unto itself —
and so it is, there’s
the “river god” (a live actor digitally augmented);
she faces off with
her own personal demon — her character’s dark side,
called her
“painbody” — another live performer who
materializes out of Bjork’s
backpack; and these characters then swirl into a vortex-like CG
waterfall plummeting downward at the video’s climax.
Hellfritsch
and Saxon shot Björk and her doppelganger hanging upside down
so they
could capture the look of their hair falling naturally.
The directing partners’ second innovation was for use in
post: a wooden
box of their own making allowing a polarized stereo display with a
right-angle beam-splitter. Dubbed a “Vizard,” the
box allowed them to
quickly gauge if their two stereo streams flowed naturally into one 3D
image. UVPhactory’s After Effects compositors worked in
anaglyph mode —
classic 3D glasses with one blue eye and one red.
Article in Post Magazine, february 2008
