![]() “I remember struggling a lot, and we were late because of the hair, and I said to someone, ‘If anybody tells me it’s good, I’ll light a candle in the church,’” Olivier recalls. He notes that it was just grunt work – carried out over about two weeks – to get it done. What made multiple Minogues much more convincing was dealing with the hair and ensuring each separate Kylie looked like she was on a separate layer. ![]() The first efforts looked ‘good’, says Olivier, but it was almost too perfect. One of the trickiest parts was the hair, and for that we used Combustion a lot.” Rotoscoping is very, very time consuming, you just need patience. “I hired seven people, five people who had never done special effects, and they were just using my programme to rotoscope, and they were doing a good job. Taking the eventual motion control footage from the shoot, Olivier began post production at his office in Paris, launching straight into the rotoscoping. I have some little tricks that make it fast and smart. To this day, I can rotoscope ten times faster than any other rotoscoping programme. “I went straight to my computer and programmed a way to rotoscope faster. The change immediately initiated a response from Olivier, realising he would need to find a faster way to rotoscope more background actors. According to his brother, Michel told him, ‘I have 15 extras, but it’s not enough, we need to double it. Just three days before the shoot, the director altered another significant detail. That wasn’t the only change Michel Gondry initiated. So, Michel had each walk cycle as a one minute loop, then Kylie would come back to the same position, and the motion control rig would go around again.” Originally it was a bit longer here and there. The song was was 4 min and 16 seconds in the end, and Michael made it four loops of approximately one minute long. “The trick that Michel came up with really required that loop, and so he asked Kylie to change the song a bit, and she said yes. Background action was also co-ordinated to ensure some fun moments such as the same character climbing four separate ladders.īefore anything could be filmed, however, Michel Gondry had to make one special request of Minogue – change the song. These actions were tightly choreographed, in particular for Minogue so that she would actually do things like walk under her own arm. ( jump to the bottom for some extra info about the mo-co shoot). ![]() To film the clip, a Milo motion control rig situated on a track in the middle of that intersection was used to film exactly the same move over and over, while Minogue and the extras performed their actions. For Minogue’s clip, the effect would be much more front and centre. The director had done something slightly similar in a promo for Neneh Cherry’s Feel It (1997). His clip for Come Into My World was, on the face of it, also incredibly simple – Minogue would walk around the intersection of Rue du Point du Jour and Rue de Solférino, in Boulogne-Billancourt, Paris, singing the song, but each loop found her, and the others in the street, multiplied. Sometimes, of course, his pieces eschewed any kind of enhancement and remained completely and cleverly analogue and relied heavily on ‘simple’ in-camera effects. Michel Gondry was a go-to music video director around that era, and often employed subtle visual effects methods in his eye-catching clips. I recently got a chance to chat to Olivier, now an accomplished commercials director himself, to revisit how Come Into My World was made. The two had been regular collaborators on some of the most memorable music videos from that time, including The Chemical Brothers’ Star Guitar at that time their post production company was called Twisted Laboratories. To make that possible, the clip was filmed with a motion control camera on the street, with the meticulous rotoscoping and compositing led by Michel’s brother, Olivier Gondry. In it, Minogue strolls around the same Parisian intersection four times, each loop bringing a further duplication of the singer and the people around her. One promo directed by Michel Gondry that has always stayed in my mind is Come Into My World by Kylie Minogue, released in 2002 and now celebrating its 15th anniversary. What better way to stand out amongst the crowd in music video promos. Of course, this was at the same time that CGI was making headways in feature filmmaking, with music videos taking advantage, too, of advancements in digital effects, particularly compositing, to help tell their stories, often in quirky and unique ways. My recollection of music videos from the 1990s to early 2000s is that they were almost like the ultimate VFX showreel.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |