PRODUCER / COMPOSITING / VFX

The director Joe and I were very excited and honored to be able to create a video for an artist that is a favorite for both of us. Like with a lot of music videos, the timeline was obscenely ambitious and so was the concept. For my part, every outdoor shot had wires, lights, and/or background removal—in addition to any effects I would add, such as atmosphere, set extensions, and fake volumetric lighting.

The shots in the ending sequence (particularly those you can see in my current compositing reel) were long, complicated, and because of the ambition of the timeline, shot rapidly without much consideration for how I was going to do my part.

Giant, lengthy shots, with a moving camera, rigs that needed removing, backgrounds that needed to be inserted, foregrounds that needed to be comped in, a soft-edged tornado that needed to be rotoscoped out, debris and wind effects that needed to be added in, and all sorts of other all piled up in those final shots. And yet the deadlines demanded that I utilize every shortcut and brute-force method in my toolkit. Within an individual shot I would use a luma key to cut out one part, a greenscreen key for another area of the frame, and manual roto for yet another. Some of the shorter shots in the middle had seizure-inducing lighting changes—which meant that every three frames, whatever shortcut I was using to try to cut objects out from the background had to change because the color profile of the objects vs. their backgrounds would shift.

Ultimately we were both incredibly proud of our work, but when I watch the video, I find myself wincing at the compromises I had to make with background replacements that were too simplistic for what I had hoped to achieve and effects that couldn’t be quite dialed in to my liking.