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MillimeterSilicon Surgery
Mar 1, 2002 12:00 PM, Michael Goldman
According to James Cooper, senior Inferno artist at Topix, Toronto, the new video for Barenaked Ladies amounted to “silicon surgery—digital lip and skin grafts.” That’s because the new video—for the song “Thanks, That was Fun”—consists entirely of clips from old videos made by the band, updated via digital lip- and facial-replacement work performed by Cooper and fellow Inferno artists Dominik Bochenski and Lee Towndrow.
Cooper says the use of clips from 13 old videos made over the course of 10 years was complicated because of the volume of work and the fact that faces of group members have changed significantly in the last decade.
“They’ve done lots of videos, and in some, they have goatees, and some they don’t, and their coloring and movements are different,” he says. “We also had to deal with different film stocks, perspective changes, and camera moves.”
The basic approach was to roughly offline the piece first and then to conduct a live-action shoot under director Pierre Tremblay’s and DP George Vale’s direction—to acquire facial “pieces” that would later be inserted into old footage.
“We cut the old clips together in advance of the shoot, and then separated and grouped them according to the kind of lip-synch we would need,” Cooper says. “We needed that offline first in order to match up the lip-synch, shot by shot. We shot their mouths, lips, noses, and so on, trying our best to match light and extreme angles. Rather than attempting to match every camera perspective, we tended to match extreme camera angles and then morph between them in Inferno back to original shots.”
The concept was made more difficult by “the beard issue,” according to Cooper.
“We tried to use goatees from old shots and warp them in Inferno to match the new lip-synch, whenever possible,” he explains. “But sometimes things got convoluted—taking an old goatee, putting it on new footage, and then taking the bottom of that new face and putting it back into old footage.”
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
