CROSS COUNTRY MUSIC VIDEO
I created this music video for Snakeskin's single "Cross Country" from the album Summoning Suit. The video depicts a duet between Snake and a mysterious clown-like figure called Magic Man. Over the course of the video, the power dynamic between the two evolves, concluding with Snake exorcising/defeating/releasing Magic Man -- who, no longer with a human face, performs one final solo dance before vanishing into the darkness.
DESIGNING A CLIMACTIC DUET AND A DUEL WITH LIMITED RESOURCES
The video is the climactic finale of a 5-part music video series for the Summoning Suit album. The videos are loosely connected through characters -- like Magic Man -- and themes -- such as Snake overcoming inner obstacles as she finds her strength. The project is grand in scale, but fully self-funded, and largely created by Shanna Polley and myself alone. So, there were a lot of discussions about how to "right size" the videos we created so that we could actually complete our projects. We scaled this shoot down from a fully 3D project to a real shoot in a single location that we completed over two days.
The production involved costume design, lighting and location design, 3D performance capture and rendering, as well as planning a shoot in which Snake from Snakeskin plays two characters who interact on camera. I'll share some details about how we pulled it off below.
FILMING
We filmed in a friend's unfinished warehouse, approximately 20'x30'. He had recently redone the floor, and the concrete had dried in this beautiful two-shade gray texture. Taken by itself, the floor feels otherworldly and surreal. We didn't want to see any of the walls, so we used his custom-built 4'6' ceiling-mounted light as the primary light source for the entire shoot. This bright light allowed the background to appear pitch black in the final video, creating a dynamic lighting environment for the performances. You'll see that the second shot of the video derives almost all of its interest from the way Magic Man's face seems to evolve as it walks from darkness and into the light.
The light and floor really shaped the entire shoot. I treated them as production constraints; they dictated a fixed camera angle, an emphasis on how characters move in the light, and the start of a color palette for the production.
PLANNING THE SHOOT
Knowing I only had two days to shoot, only myself, Shanna, and my friend available to help with the production, and the task of recording a choreographed dance in which one actor plays both dancing partners for 6 minutes -- not to mention a two-minute performance capture section for the outro -- I spent a lot of time creating a detailed shot list and schedule. Since I kept track of the shots, I formatted my shot list as a to-do list in Apple Notes that I could quickly check off on an iPad.
We filmed Magic Man on the first day and Snake on the second day. Every section of the script includes a locked-down wide shot that I used to composite both characters together, plus close-up and insert shots I captured on a separate gimbal camera. This careful planning a solid, locked-down shot, ensured that the shoot went smoothly.
Designing the costume was really fun. Shanna and I collected the materials together and built the costume ourselves. It is always refreshing when a project includes physical making, which I don't get to do as often as I'd like.
PERFORMANCE CAPTURE FOR MAGIC MAN'S DANCE
The video's denouement sees Magic Man, who was melted into a puddle by Snake, rise as a disembodied cloth and pointed cap that performs a final dance before disappearing into the darkness. To create this, I used performance capture to record Shanna dancing. I used a machine learning tool, Wonder Dynamics, to translate her performance into the skeleton of our 3D magic man character. I used Blender to add in a cloth simulation and careful recreation of the real-life materials and lighting, and the final result looks great for being done on a single laptop.
Shanna's performance draws on her years of taking ballet dance classes. Although Magic Man has no arms and legs, the dance translates beautifully into the character. Above, you can see both the original performance and the final render super-imposed on one another.
