WILCO 'SOMEONE TO LOSE'
(OFFICIAL VIDEO)

COMPOSITING

One of the more elaborate compositing jobs I've had to do for Joe Baughman. I had done quite a bit of wire removal for Matisyahu's Hard Way video. Interestingly, though, it can often be much more challenging--in large part due to the typical lack of motion blur--with stop motion. With conventionally filmed footage, there is a blurriness that comes with either a moving camera or objects moving in front of the camera that can serve to hide subtle visual effects adjustments. This can even be subtly heightened to conceal extensive tampering. With stop motion, however, every frame is crystal clear because, of course, nothing is moving within the frame when each snapshot is taken. So there is no blurriness to hide behind and so your work is very naked. Any time any person (or beast) is flying across the screen there is a rigid wire wrapped around their bodies and rising up through the screen in all sorts of crooked angles. Since a few of the scenes feature a flying armada of clothespin wedding revelers filled with self-righteous revenge, I had a lot of work carved out for me and, as always, a very imminent deadline for completion. Simple wire removal techniques weren't always the most efficacious, because those generally assume the "wire" that you're removing is simply a straight line, but because of the subtle shifts that needed to be made with the stop motion, each individual wire inevitably had several twists and turns. Between the bent wires and the ever-changing parallaxing foreground and background elements cutting in and out at different focal levels (see the forest flight shot at 2:41 for such an example), every frame took quite some time to adjust. I told Joe that it is quite possible that, for the first time, some of these shots I worked on in post-production took me the same length of time as it took him to animate them originally.

Probably not.

But I like to whine.