Music videos: it takes more than scantily-clad, beautiful people to keep the MTV generation from changing channels

Post, Nov, 2002 by Ann Fisher

There's just so much imagery out there, how can you get viewers to watch the four-minute music videos that you worked on? "Holding people's interest is in the cut, in the power of the imagery--a couple of gorgeous girls in gold bikinis doesn't hurt," laughs Mat Beck, owner/visual effects supervisor at Entity FX, who worked on Peter Gabriel's bizarre new video The Barry Williams Show. Of course, those were only some of the elements in a music video that we'll get to later, but it's a good example of how far some artists are willing to go to reach out there to grab those eyeballs. The visual effects guys and editors are helping the artists' reach exceed their grasp.

GREAT CONCEPT

When it comes to far-out visual effects, LA's Kroma (ww.kroma.biz) is right out there on the edge, having had its fingers in videos for Busta Rhymes, Madonna and, most recently, Bon Jovi. Everyday was featured on VHI's new show Video Playback, a back door look at how new videos were made. The premise is media saturation. The imagery is televisions everywhere--Africa, Rome, Israel, Japan, Cuba and Australia. They literally fall from the sky, and Ron Jovi is singing on them all. His performance was lensed on the New Mexico satellite farm used in the movie Contact.

The idea was that of director Todd Kellstein of Joseph Kahn/Super-mega. Kroma artist Bert Yukich and his team composited the effects on an AvidJDS and used Discreet 3DSMax for 3D animation. A 10-year industry veteran, Yukich and his wife, visual effects producer Amy, opened Kroma's doors earlier this year so they could amplify their clients' vision as they saw fit. Most of their work is on music videos, though their effects also appear in film and television.

Yukich says no unusual techniques were used when creating the effects: The practical TVs were shot with greenscreen and Bon Jovi's performance was composited on them. A 3D television model was created for more dynamic effects like dropping from the sky. Kroma also created a dancing 3D alien who appears from a glowing holographic projector.

THE CHALLENGE: Yukich says it was the singer's laugh lines, a common problem as performers age. "One of the advantages of the AvidJDS is its paint tool. It's a lot better than Flame or any other paint out there. It has a vector-based paint system, which allows you to do multiple layers of different effects inside the paint. He had these deep laugh lines, they created really black lines, when he was performing with his mouth open so we used the DS paint to clean that up," he says.

THE MUSIC

"One thing that doesn't hurt is a good song," says Entity owner Mat Beck of Peter Gabriel's The Barry Williams Show, the first single release from his new album Up. 'It's a dark satirical subject yet he has this hauntingly beautiful voice, and those two things mix with each other in an interesting way. There's a lot going on--there's about eight minutes of video in four and a half minutes. There's an enormous amount of production value in terms of visual effects and shoot days."

The video has been in VHI rotation since September. Entity (www.entityfx.com) provides visual effects for music videos, commercials, television shows (WB's Smallville) and movies (Sweet Home Alabama). The Peter Gabriel video was directed by actor Sean Penn with CIH Shorts and edited by Jay Cassidy. Its premise is a tabloid daytime talk show, with a Jerry Springer-like host. Think high-end visual effects meets cheesy TV video effects. There's a lot of blood from stigmatas and crying, some shot in camera, some created digitally. "We went for the cheese," says Beck of a surreal atmosphere that has people slipping through mutilayered composites in and out of frames. All effects, conforming and finishing were done in-house. Compositing work was done on Inferno and Flame. Maya was used for 3D animation.

Entity worked a little differently on this one. Penn and Cassidy edited downstairs while the visual effects artists created upstairs. The resulting efficiency and creative ferment was "a closer integration than we've had in the past and we want to explore more in the future," says Beck.

THE CHALLENGE: One was turning it around quickly... in five days. There were a lot of invisible effects--editorial matches, size and speed changes, stretches and squeezes--that had to be matched in the box. Entity not only did the effects, they finished the effects. The other challenge was that all the transfer was done in HD so it could be delivered in optimal quality in PAL and NTSC. This gave Gabriel the option to use it in his concert tour projection.

CRY A LITTLE

A song with emotional appeal, like Faith Hill's new Cry video, will grab an audience. LA's Riot (www.rioting.com) created the visual effects on this one. "The special effects are interesting but there's also the motivation behind these visual effects in terms of trying to find a place in peoples' hearts and their memories," says Ryan Thompson, visual effects producer.

The client was director Mike Lipscombe. The video takes place in a dramatic gothic house with an interesting visual storyline. The song spans much of the singer's lifetime so the visuals cut between her happy childhood home and her chillier adult home. The artful transitions appear as washes, as color seeps over the walls and images of young children playing appear it reverses and color drains into a cold home where Hill performs.