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Let’s start with some statistics. Shooting the material took us 2 nights, totalling only 4 hours. I count that as a personal record. Editing has taken now 82 hours not including the rendering time with powerful 27″ i7 iMac. I’ll sum up the totals when the video is finally ready. Everything looks very nice and I suppose we will get it ready within 2 weeks!

The editing is taking place in pure HD environment, for pixel oriented people this means that we downgraded from our 2064 x 1370 pixel material to Bluray compatible 1920 x 1080 resolution.

The video will have 7 different settings for the action. Check out the video at the end of this post if you want to have a peek. We are using After Effects to create to environment and Final Cut to put them in place after is has been rendered. This is what a set-up looks like in After Effects and below is the salad with Final Cut.

We went to shoot some background material with Petri to a old factory in Hirvihaara. What we did not expect was that as it is abandoned, nobody took the snow away from the paths to the factory. It has been a very snowy winter this time in Finland so we ended up crawling in snow well over to our knees. I guess there was about 1 meter of it.

The factory was awesome, we definitely need to shoot a video inside the premises some day. It’s very clean as it was supposed to be a site that they would establish loft apartments. I guess they ran out of money as nothing else expect the cleaning was done. We shot about 300 pictures and crawled back in the snow and got our car pushed out of the “parking space”.

So, back to the scenes. As we shot the material with greenscreen, the setting for the video is just the matter of inspiration and imagination. Video starts with some flames and explosions (yeaa!) and gets little bit more calm with the world with cold smoke and darkness. We work our way from the fire (“Never felt so fine, I’m warm inside”) to dust and from that point we head to mirrors and more flames and explosions (yeaaaah!).

I made you a little video about the scenery that will be seen in the video. 11 second clip from one scene took 11 minutes to render and size for one 11 second clip is 1.6G. Video is half way finished and the directory contains different scenes worth 62.7G. Not bad for just a little bit over 10 000 still pictures?

vimeo Making of (part 2)

First I must go a little bit back in time to the making of “Lucid”.

We bought a Nikon D90 to make the music video for song named “Lucid” last year. Camera and the video quality is awesome eventhough it takes a lot of time to get the settings correct compared to the usual way to film with camcorder. One of the most annoying thing was the flickering that happened due to our 50hz electricity and using artificial lightning. We wanted the video to be dark and melancholy so we used very little lightning.
I think the video for “Lucid” ended up to be very intense and worth the extra work. The lense we used was a sharp Sigma 30mm 1.4 that performed very good in the low light conditions.

Here is “Lucid” :

vimeo Neverdice: Lucid

This is how the original material looked like. By the time of the filming we used to rehearse in the same place with band End Of You so the space was a bit limited. Nothing in the background that you cannot fix afterwards, right?

As we were very happy with the quality of the camera, we decided to use the same setup with the “I Am Happy” video too but this time we would be shooting only images, no video at all.

Yes. Still images. Photographs. A lot of photographs. Fortunately we were able to book a good quality greenscreenstudio with proper light equipment to work with.

We shot a little bit over 12 000 still images during the 2 days shooting period. After couple of days editing, 1630 images were deleted and we were left with 10370 images that should be animated. Camera performed quite well, so we were able to shoot 4.5 frames / second with “low” quality (meaning a picture sized 2144 x 1424 pixels).

10370 images were then animated as 9fps video so that means we got us 127 different scenes for the video. All editing will be done in the native resolution so the material will be sharper than 1080p HD video.

The idea is to make the video look surreal and I will write about creating the surroundings in part 2. The trick we are using on the animated material is to turn 9fps animation to 25fps by using custom Neverdice magic.

I made a video for you from one scene where Toni is playing the chorus of the song. The scenery is still missing but I will update on that later:

vimeo Making of (part 1)