Context:
Contribution:
Duration:
Music video and concert tour visuals
Co-director, VFX artist
12 months (part-time)
Will Galperin and I were approached by a small record label in Amsterdam to create a music video and later, concert tour visuals, for an upcoming release by ambient duo Suzanne Kraft and Jonny Nash.
Slitscan processing and improvised movement anchored our visual vocabulary, rendering a fluid and haunting meditation on introspection. Craig Hollamon directed the choreography, designing a language within which other performers also improvised. We all worked in dialogue to balance the movement, direction, and effects design across the music video shown above and a 45 minute tour visuals projection, shown in stills below.
Slitscanning refers to several methods of recording sections of images at different times, visualizing movement in an unexpected and compelling way. Creatively, we were particularly inspired by artist Daniel Crooks, whose video art often features slitscanning. It can be done in custom code or in our case, in The Foundry's Nuke compositing software, which proved particularly up to to the task of dealing with high memory requirements and was easy to deploy on a remote render farm when an unexpected deadline approached.
Slitscan pieces often tend to focus on environmental or bodily motion, tuning their approach to whatever produces the most surprising interpretation of their subject. We were interested in the potential to take a more filmic approach and create a sense of impressionistic narrative by relating characters to environments. Various types of camera support helped us explore moving subjects and backgrounds at different speeds, including a chairlift, a convertible, and a rotating hotel bar.
