technical challenge

The new wave of post-production boxes make it look easy, but special effects can still be a bear to put together. Take the new Ron Sexsmith video, Words We Never Use, directed by up-and-coming director Tim Hamilton.

Shot through Hoodoo Films for Warner Bros. Records Canada and Interscope Records in l.a., the video is a combination of live action, special effects, and tabletop work that came together after three weeks of problem-solving. ‘Every step was a technical challenge,’ says Hamilton.

The video tells its story through a series of black-and-white photographs. Those photographs, like a series of three-by-five television screens, show live-action footage as the motion-control camera moves over them laid out on a table. The illusion is that you’re looking at a series of moving photographs, but what you’re actually seeing is the camera moving over 2,200 stills. It’s the pocket flip-book approach to motion.

Footage was shot at 15fps as opposed to the usual 24-30fps scenario, with special attention paid to how the contrasts would change once it was proofed in black and white.

From the first off-line edit, 2,200 stills were printed from about every second frame. The West Camera staff had their hands full overriding many of the automatic controls on the stills printer that kept trying to compensate for changes in lighting.

‘Animating the stills had to be frame-accurate or we would have lost the sense of the story. The song had to correspond with the words Ron was singing,’ says Hamilton. Using the time code on the music as a reference, each still had a corresponding number dictating when it would appear. For three days, Film Optical’s motion-control camera worked four frames at a time, moving over 150 to 310 stills for each photograph, and overloading once in a while as it tried to process a ton of information.

This final footage was sped up, giving the pictures a live if not somewhat jerky quality. The eye is seeing 7.5fps, so it’s going to look that way, says Hamilton. ‘Single-frame animation would have cost a fortune and taken four times as long. The final product is true to the spirit of the concept. We didn’t want it to look too clean. It’s deliberately gritty.’