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Postproduction Music Video Effects Get Complicated

Nov 13, 2007 12:00 PM

For Colombian mega-star Juanes, the music video directing duo Aggressive, a.k.a. Alex Topaller and Dan Shapiro, created the video for "Me Enamora," the first single off Juanes’ new album La Vida es un Ratico (Universal Music Latino). The single has skyrocketed to number one in all Latin markets, holding its place for more than four consecutive weeks, and it topped the charts in more than 14 countries. Juanes is also the featured artist for the month of October on MTV Tr3s. The music video was so successful, that at Universal's request, Aggressive adapted elements from the video to integrate into Juanes' live performance at the MTV Tr3S Los Premios Awards 2007, where he was the featured presenter.

This is not a conventional Latin love-story. Aggressive decided to take things to the road, having Juanes enlist dozens of uniformed highway workers to deliver his message of heartfelt love via colorful handheld digital signs. Shooting everything on greenscreen and doing their own visuals, Aggressive not only composited the rows upon rows of marching workers onto the dark, atmospheric highway, but also had to track Juanes' performance footage onto hundreds of spinning, flipping, and shaking handheld blue cards. Post-wise this was a technical nightmare.

“Let's break it down: First off, the concept of the video has our hero-girl encounter hundreds of marching highway construction workers on a dark country road,” Shapiro says. “We shot everything on green, so both the highway environment and Juanes' LED performance space were created entirely in post. To create the rows of marchers, Alex and I composited layer upon layer of keyed-out HD footage in z-space (not an easy thing for a PC to handle). But that was the easy part. Because the main visual device of the video was hundreds of handheld video panels, it was crucial that Juanes' bright performance setup look like a real physical object held, flipped, and spun in the shaky hands of the marchers. To accomplish this, we shot the marchers holding and manipulating big blue cards with track marks, and then used [Adobe] After Effects to corner-pin track Juanes' performance onto each and every card, sometimes dozens in a scene, for well over a hundred shots.”

“As the cards were flipped, they would fall in and out of shadow, causing problems keying,” Topaller says. “However, after trying a number of reflective surfaces, we found chroma-blue paint (and a lot of roto-scoping when needed), to be the best solution. For keying we used [The Foundry’s] Keylight, which usually managed to preserve realistic shadows on the cards.”

Shapiro and Topaller, who are also VFX Artists, executed their complex effects and composites at the independent design, effects, and post finishing company, Guerilla FX (New York), on Autodesk 3D Studio Max version 9 and Adobe After Effects version 7. Guerilla’s Jason Yantz completed the online editing assignment on a Mac in Apple Final Cut Pro.

The music video was produced by RefusedTV (Los Angeles) and shot by Aggressive at Ben Kitay Stages (Los Angeles) with executive producer Cathy Pellow, producer JP Fox, director of photography Damien Acevedo, and Adam Lawson, the assistant director.

Juanes’ "Me Enamora” (Universal Music Latino) is the eighth video directed by the Aggressive duo. Their other music videos include: The Click Five "Jenny" (Atlantic Records); Killswitch Engage "The Arms of Sorrow" (Roadrunner Records); Megadeth "A Tout le Monde (Set Me Free)" (Roadrunner Records); Bloc Party "I Still Remember" (Vice Records); Black Label Society" Concrete Jungle" (Roadrunner Records); Hoobastank "Born to Lead" (Island/Def Jam Records); and Lil' Rob "Summer Nights" (Upstairs Records).

For more information, visit www.guerillafx.com. To see the video, click here.

Credits:
Production Company: RefusedTV
City/State: Los Angeles
Directors: Aggressive
Executive Producer: Cathy Pellow
Producer: JP Fox
Director of Photography: Damien Acevedo
Assistant Director: Adam Lawson

Stage:
Ben Kitay Stages (Los Angeles)

Postproduction:Guerilla FX (New York)
VFX Artists: Aggressive
Editor: Jason Yantz
Equipment: Autodesk 3D Studio Max version 9, Adobe After Effects version 7, and Apple Final Cut Pro.

© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.