COVER STORY: BJORK'S 'WANDERLUST' MUSIC VIDEO
NEW YORK — Music videos are not just for MTV anymore; just ask Bowling
for Soup. Or check out Bjork’s latest — a Mongolian fantasia involving
a romp in a CG river, a herd of digitally replicated giant yak puppets
and lots more.
“Wanderlust,” on her recent CD, “Volta,” is six minutes long and the
new video Wanderlust is over seven minutes with its extended intro. And
it’s in stereoscopic 3D. With lots of 3D animation and effects and
surreal characters and surroundings. The yaks even get to bellow
rhythmically in the opening sequence.
Wanderlust appears in stereo — 3D glasses included — on Bjork’s new
DVD. But there’s more in store for such an ambitious video. The
producers plan to get the piece screened theatrically in New York, LA
and San Francisco. They also plan to run the video online for those who
have their own anaglyph glasses. The televised version will appear in
standard definition.
Damijan Saccio is principal and co-founder, with Scott Sindorf, of New
York-based UVPhactory (www.uvph.com). The design, production and motion
graphics boutique’s slogan is “How can we do something that we’ve never
done before?” Last August, Saccio and company were challenged with just
that. One important factor in Wanderlust is the water in the river
Bjork, and her yaks, encounter. It is alive. The video’s San
Francisco-based directors, who do business as Encyclopedia Pictura
(represented by Ghost Robot in NYC), intended to give Bjork a seemingly
living testament to her song’s inner meaning.
But this water, created by Saccio’s team at UVPhactory in
Softimage|XSI, would be interactive, it would have full
three-dimensional depth and would be woven, not from some shrink-wrap
water-generating software, and not from a particle program, but from an
XSI “human hair” simulating module. The undulating river water also
bubbles, boils, splashes (splashing is a particle program) and
ultimately generates a “rivergod” being which in turn causes a dramatic
waterfall “vortex” that sweeps away the god, Bjork, her fantastical
alter-ego and even the yaks.
Saccio salutes a large team of hard workers on Wanderlust — there were
about 40 artists contributing, off and on (see their Website for
complete credits), to the post process alone and they created 37
different water shots. Softimage even sent an engineer, Dilip Singh, to
help UVPhactory train XSI’s human hair program to behave like water.
UVPhactory compositors worked in After Effects to provide rig removal
and background removal for the numerous comps in essentially every
scene.
GIANT YAKS
Directing team Sean Hellfritsch and Isaiah Saxon intended to do big
things for Bjork 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
Bjork’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 Bjork 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.
EDITING IS GOOD
The directors got right to work editing Wanderlust in Adobe Premiere
after they shot it last summer. Of course, this greenscreen shoot would
yield a rough cut full of holes to be filled with matte backgrounds of
fabulous mountains and sky, lots of yaks and the CG water — but at
least it’s a roadmap. For Saccio Wanderlust proved to be “a unique
challenge. Being shot stereographically, every scene we do in 3D we
have to do twice. This was a labor of love.”