Practical and computer-based effects each come with their own unique set of challenges, and director Filip Sterckx decided to take on both sets when making the music video for “Sweater” by Willow. Consisting of a live-action lead singer traveling through a projected computer-animated world, making the video posed a unique set of challenges. We talked to Filip about the video, projection technology, and getting inspiration from a PlayStation 3 commercial.

Doug: Where did the idea and concept for this video originate?

Filip: Technically, I've been doing projects like this for about ten years now. I've been working a lot with projections. I saw this PlayStation 3 commercial that's made with projections, it’s called "The Most Insane Immersive Movie Experience Ever." When I saw it I was completely blown away. I felt that there was still lots of undiscovered territory within this technique, and I really wanted to push the boundaries with this concept. When the band asked me to make the video, I already had the idea to do something with this concept. At the time, I didn’t completely know how it was done technically, but I’m part of a mapping collective - it’s called Skullmapping - and we specialize in projections onto big buildings or shapes. In our latest project we actually projected onto the street. Similar to these famous street paintings that you might have seen on the internet that work with perspectives. They give you the illusion that there is a world under the ground, and that there is a whole scene. It’s like a perspective trick, and we did it with projections, and with moving images.

Once I had done this project with my colleagues from Skull Mapping, I felt confident to not only project onto the floor and use this perspective trick, but also onto two walls. That’s technically what brought me to this concept. Also, in terms of the subject, I knew technically it was going to be quite a challenge. There were things that I was a bit unsure of, so I wanted to keep the story itself very basic. For example, I’ve seen the "Strawberry Swing" video from Coldplay. I read an interview with Shynola, and also they said something that they wanted to use a very simple story - like a Mario Brothers story almost of a guy who goes to save the princess. I thought of doing something similar with this, I thought something very basic would be good because the technique would be so overwhelming for myself, but also I think for the audience to watch. But, I thought it wouldn’t be a problem if there wasn’t much real story going on. As a concept, the singer told me that the song is about a rough breakup, which is where his whole sweater concept comes from. You breakup with your girlfriend and then you go to her place to pick up your old stuff, like a sweater that she still has. That’s why I decided to let him undertake this journey. He's always going down in the video, to the point where he ends up on the bottom of the ocean, and then he goes even more down to the center of the earth. Of course, once you’re in the center of the earth the only way is up. You can’t go down anymore, which is a metaphor for a breakup. It goes down for a long time, or you can feel down, but in the end time heals all wounds and you eventually go back up, something like that.

Doug: Getting to more of the technical side of it. Once you come up with the idea, do you then start to build the world for the projector, or did you have the set constructed first? What's the process?

Filip: First, I drew a very rough storyboard. It was just for myself to get an idea of the scenes. Then, I went straight into the 3D software on my computer and I started to make this world. I had sort of a digital character, which represented the singer, that was walking through these different sets, just to give the band an idea and also to give the record label an idea to visualize it for them - even though when they saw this they couldn’t really figure out what I was going to do. First, I tried to build as many as digital sets before I actually started filming, but the problem was that I only had time to finish the animations until the point where he hit the bottom of the ocean before we went into the studio and actually start shooting. In the evenings after we had done the shoot, I went home and I worked again on the 3D. In the end, I think we went one week over the deadline, and the singer had to go to London for a couple of days, and that gave me the time to finish all the animation. But it’s very different seeing this 3D content on your screen then it is seeing it projected in this room. A lot of times I wasn't happy with how it looked, so I had to go back into the 3D software, which takes a long time. Even for a short, five second shot, you can spend a couple hours just waiting for it to render out. That made it very time consuming, as was the shoot itself. Sometimes I would arrive on set, prepare the mapping, project them out and for some reason it didn’t work as I had intended. Some days we didn’t even shoot anything. It was done with a very low budget, very do it yourself, so I didn’t have so much pressure. I wasn’t paying for the studio, which wasn't an official studio, so there was no pressure. I had all this time to experiment and try again, which was actually very nice for something like this.

Doug: When watching the video, I didn't realize you shot the it over a few days.

Filip: it actually took about two weeks. It was not constant shooting because the singer has a daytime job, so sometimes he would arrive late in the afternoon. We did a couple of takes, for example when he was on the boat, something like that could be done in one day. I think that if you prepare everything well, and you’re shooting it with a good crew, and you have some experience with it, then maybe you can prepare everything and shoot everything in a day or two. I think the way we did it, because it was so low budget and we were basically just a two person crew, me and my DP - that everything took us a long time. Also, for example, in the end when he jumps into the hole, just to get that right he had to jump around 50 times. Also, because I didn’t have a monitor to check what my cameraman was shooting, we had to load it up on the computer after each take, check it there, and make any adjustments. To see what I didn’t like or what I like and we did it again, we really took our time.

Doug: What’s the process it with working with the singer as he goes through the performance? Was there a lot of rehearsing to get the movements right?

Filip: It took a very long time to get everything synchronized, like his movements with the projection, because from his point of view the projection looks totally skewed - it almost doesn’t make sense. For example, when he’s on the alternating escalator to the subway, for him it wasn’t clear on which step he had to be on because he can't see himself. Also, synchronizing with the singing and all the walking because he had to look in front of him, so he often fell or lost his balance. All this stuff took quite a long time to get everything synchronized.

Doug: At the beginning of the video you see some initial setup shots and you see the camera and stuff, and then at end the lights raise up and the crew comes on the set and starts clapping. What was behind having those elements in the video?

Filip: At first, I didn’t plan to have this opening the way it is now, where you see me sitting behind the computer and the close up of the projector, but it’s something the record label really asked for when they first saw it. In the end, I can agree with them in a way because it established that we did this with projection as opposed to doing everything in post and shooting with green screens. I don’t think it was a bad idea to show people how we did it. It’s an important part of the magic I think. Even now it’s still not clear for some people how it’s actually done or what’s going on, so I think the more that was explained the more magical the experience became. Then about the ending, that's actually not the crew, but the rest of the band. That’s something that the band really wanted, to have their faces in the video because the rest of it is just the lead singer. It’s something they asked me for in the beginning, but I didn’t know how to implement them, so that’s how we solved it.

Doug: Getting a bit to SXSW and having the video screen there. Is that significant to you?

Filip: It’s very hard for me answer because, of course, I wasn't there. For me, the biggest thing was just that this video went viral on the internet, and that happened back in September, when it was posted onto the Vimeo Staff Picks and then on tons of blogs. That really was a big boost for my career, since then I’ve been contacted by dozens of very nice production companies that want to represent me as a director. In terms of visibility, for me, that’s been really a dream come true. Only to see my video on the Vimeo Staff Picks which was already amazing, and everything that came after that is extra. Being in Belgium, it’s a very small market to make music videos, so the budgets are usually quite low. I think internationally the budgets these days are not too good for music videos either, but in Belgium they're even less. Also in terms of visibility, you really have to have a very good video or very good song to have your video seen in other countries aside from Belgium. It’s very hard to break through this barrier, so I’m very happy that with this video we succeeded in doing this because it’s a lot of unpaid work that goes into it. I’m very happy with the fruits that came off of this tree.

Doug Klinger is the co-founder/content director of IMVDb and watches more music videos than anyone on earth. You can find him on twitter at @doug_klinger.