PRODUCER / ASSISTANT DIRECTOR / COMPOSITING

This is the second video we did for Matisyahu. This video pre-production became a hobby for directorJoe Baughman for a summer as he constructed the green treehouse and rope bridge seen in the video. The place became a kind of dream clubhouse for our childhood selves.

Most of my compositing work in this video is cable removal and brand logo removal (our child actor just *had* to wear Nike shoes with a giant swoosh on the side that day, didn’t he?). I also spent an inordinate amount of time compositing the reflection of fireworks into the eyes of our female child actor, Stella, when she has her head through the window staring on in wonder. Unfortunately the effect was apparently a bit *too* finely nuanced, as, after YouTube compression, the effect is impossible to spot. But it remains there in my heart, and that’s the most important thing…?

Random Notes:

• At 3:20 our child actor pulls out a driver’s license from among the other treasures in the purse. I noted that it may be unwise to have a very real driver’s license reveal our friend’s vital info, so I was rewarded by being tasked with finding a way to obfuscate the information. So now, through the power of the fake sunlight that I composited in, the driver’s license magically glows like the suitcase in Pulp Fiction. But then I had to add in a little reflection of light onto his face to sell it (classic domino effect) in the following shot. Maybe there’s a special, magical meaning to the object of the driver’s license that only astute viewers could deduce after a critical unpacking of the visual motifs of the video? No. No there isn’t…