The last time director Filip Sterckx worked with the band Willow, it was for the video "Sweater" and featured lead singer Pieter-Jan Van Den Troost walking through a world made from projecting computer animation on the wall and floor. Their newest collaboration, "Remedy," uses projections a bit differently, as a really fun and unique way for to transition between shots. We talked to Filip about the video, the difficulties of the technical process, and the use of bunny rabbits.
Doug: Where did the concept for this video come from?
Filip: I've been playing around with projecting on sculptures already quite a few years now, and have been presenting them as art installations at exhibitions. When Willow asked me to make another video for them, I thought it would be a cool idea to use this technique in a music video, having these "portals" to travel from one scene to the other. I'm also a big fan of the Chop Cup video. In this video, the camera needs to be in the correct position, in the right perspective, for the image to work. But as soon as the camera moves out of this position, the whole image starts to deconstruct. So as opposed to the sculptures in my installation work, I decided to make the sculptures for the "Remedy" video a lot more distorted, so that when you move out of the ideal camera position, the image starts to break apart. Also a big influence on this video was the "Let Forever Be" for The Chemical Brothers that Michel Gondry directed.
Doug: After coming up with the original concept, did you then have to map our every shot and every transition?
Filip: I did quite a bit of preparation for this video, since it was very difficult to communicate the idea to band and crew, but also to make it clear for myself. During preproduction, we shot a live action version at the locations I had in mind on a cheap camera and me acting out the scenes - without the projections off course - just to get an idea of timing. Since I still felt a bit unsure about the transitions, I decided to make an animatic in 3D software, where I did apply this principle of projection out the frame on a volume. This really gave me something to fall back onto while shooting. You can download it here. Some scenes near the end are missing, at the time I didn't know how it would end.
Doug: The last video you did with Willow shot over several weeks, was it the same for this project?
Filip: Again this video was a long process, I was hoping to finish everything in two weeks, but we ended up shooting three weeks. It just took a long time to build the sculptures, and to get the beginning and end of every scene right. During the shoot, there was a lot of trial and error for the transitions to work. One thing that was particularly difficult was the fact that if you project onto a certain volume, and want to record it again, you have to hold the camera at the position of the lens of the beamer for it to match with the previous scene. If you're not, there is so much distortion it becomes impossible to match it with the previous scene. But, if you hold the camera at the position of the lens, off course you throw a shadow on your image. So the way to fix this was to 3D-scan the sculpture once it was finished. Then recreate the setup with all right dimension between beamer and sculpture in the 3D software, digitally project the image out onto the sculpture and digitally "record" this again from a slightly different angle. Then we moved the beamer in real life to the corresponding new angle and project this new image, so that now there was space for the camera to record it from the place where the beamer used to be, and that it would be correct from this place without having the shadow problem.
Doug: Pieter-Jan Van Den Troost had some issues with the effect last time, was he a bit better at working with this effect?
Filip: Last time he was completely immersed in the projection, which made it hard to read what was happening in the projection. This time most of the time he was not surrounded by the projection, so there wasn't any issue with that. But the shots were we did project on him were a bit tricky to get right. He had to be as good as possible in the position of the scene he was before, so I basically moved all of his body as if he was a puppet to get it as close as possible.
Doug: Did the bunnies at the beginning hold any particular significance?
Filip: Haha no, it was just an early idea to do something with bunnies, at the time I was thinking to make the whole video with bunnies. I think the idea comes from this 'chipmunk' sample they used. But the idea evolved into something else, I think the whole video with bunnies would have become too silly. But it didn't want to give up completely on this first idea so that's why I decided to put them in.
