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MillimeterThe Sky Is Falling
Sep 1, 1998 12:00 PM, Matt Cheplic
The video for Jamiroquai's "Deeper Underground," from the Godzilla soundtrack, boasts some of its own monster effects shots. When the big lizard himself crashes through a movie screen, the theater floods, and audience members scurry for cover while rain, debris, and a few cars fall from the sky.
Most shooting took place in London over four days. Eleven motion-control passes of Jamiroquai, supervised by Annie Dautane of French-based Medialab, were the starting point. But to realize director Mike Lipscombe's vision, a number of steps were still necessary. First, a kind of mini-theater with just a few rows of seats was constructed on the shooting stage. That was flooded with water, and Jamiroquai was filmed leaping from row to row. Then, large tanks were filled with water and shot against blue screen. When shooting resumed in an actual-size theater, the separate water elements were tracked with Discreet's Inferno along with the footage of the mini-theater to create the illusion of an altogether flooded theater. "For the majority of the shots, we had 10 or 15 layers," says Dautane. "We had master shots of Jamiroquai guided by all the music cues. Then we had to match the timing of all the separate layers to that music. And with all the camera movement, it was very complex to track all the water."
Inferno was also used to occasionally morph Jamiroquai's feet with exact seat locations (for moments when he did not land squarely), for explosions, and for the reuse of CG Godzilla elements contributed by Centropolis. Dautane and company also used Avid's Matador to create 2K elements that would marry with the resolution of the film's elements.
The falling cars (actual vehicles, not models) were also filmed separately. They were propelled from a cannon-like mechanism and later composited against the theater plate. Says Dautane, "It was a kind of nice nightmare."
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